As of tonight, tomorrow will be October 7. Many who will write about the events of that day are more versed than I am in the phenomenology of Jew-hatred. Some are in the thick of the current efforts by my co-covenanters to stand up and face down the hatred visited on Israeli Jews that day and Jews worldwide in the days that followed.

For me, far more stunning than the outlandish cruelty of the Hamas operatives on that unspeakable day were the world-wide outpourings of identification with that cruelty. The cheers came from representative enclaves of Western civilized life, across a wide spectrum, but including especially the precincts of academe.

On one level, I was not surprised by the global cheers, though this is a level of myself that I don’t visit very often. But I will visit it tonight.

Some of my readers will readily grant the possibility that we reincarnate. Those readers will take what I’m about to tell at face value. Others believe that the trip out of this life goes one way: either to oblivion or else to a once-and-for-all settling of moral and spiritual accounts with an all-knowing Judge. Both of the latter kinds of readers will take my recollection as a waking dream or vision of some kind. 

There was a period of some years when small incidents in my life would occur that tended to confirm the factual character of my seeming past-life memory. Eventually, these verifying occurrences stopped and then the memory of them dropped away as well. Apparently these memories had been purposive: to alert me to something.

Here’s what I remember: I was a young Jewish woman in Germany in the 1930’s. The Nazis had already begun implementing a program of murdering Jews, though it was not yet systematic or directed from a central authority. Along with other Jews, I was already trying to stay hidden, and being careful not to venture out of doors. In this setting, someone must have informed on us. I don’t know who. A neighbor perhaps. There came the feared, heavy knock on the door. We were herded into the street and forced to climb into the back of a nearby parked truck. The back of the truck was then closed and sealed. Carbon monoxide was pumped into it, killing all inside.

The part I still remember vividly is leaving my body. As I rose up out of it, and above it, I paused to take in the extent of what was happening. How widespread was this phenomenon? Was it confined to the German nation – or perhaps to one faction within that nation?

What I saw would have surprised the reasonably normal American Jewish girl that, in my present life, I was raised to be. I could see that this murderous hatred was very extensive. It was in fact global. It was not a mere by-product of the special conditions that had brought the Nazi regime into power. And I resolved, when I came back, to fight it.

Though I don’t think of myself as especially distinguished in that combat, I have taken my Jewish responsibility seriously. It has seemed to me the price of the ticket.

Now for some questions. What the hell is it, this anti-Jewish hatred? Is it curable? What’s the motive? Whence the perenniality? So far as I’ve been able to tell, it doesn’t make anybody more intelligent, more handsome, more beautiful, more sexy, more enviable, more loaded with self-esteem. Its track record is ignominious. Its defamatory claims are readily refuted.

Were its deepest appetites quenched and there were finally no Jews left alive on planet earth to hate, the haters would not find themselves one wit happier than they are now.

Jews have a story, which they commemorate. The habit of memory is ingrained. They preserve the timeline, which is where their stories – collective and personal – unfold.

If you want a life story, and (in my view) that’s the way to live, start by laying up for yourself some decent memories. Live conscientiously, finding realizable aims that you can strive for sincerely and believe worth achieving, recollecting the missteps as well as the ones that went well, taking actions in sequence from which you can learn on your way to the life at which you aim. 

Note: to live that way is not easy. It’s hard. 

But the more you do that,

the less tempted you’ll be

to try to spoil someone else’s story.

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