OCTOBER 8, Part 2: If Not Now, When?

Read Part 1 of the Mini-Memoir here.

W. and I lie in bed trading stories about our emerging world.

“There’s a new protestor roaming the Jewish neighborhoods,” I tell her. “He calls himself The Vegetarian. Or maybe it’s The Vegan. He goes to that protest up at Bathurst and Sheppard. He has a sign saying: ‘I Stand For Animal Rights.’”

“What does that mean? What does he want?”

“I think he’s trying to claim that Israelis are bad because they eat a lot of meat. I read somewhere that they are the number one consumer of meat in the Middle East.

“Per capita?” asks data-intrigued, long time vegetarian wife.

“I guess…” I say uncertainly.

“And does he wear a keffiyeh?”

“Of course,” I say.

She nods as if it all makes sense.

“Did you hear about the restaurant?” she then asks me.

I shake my head. “What restaurant?”

“There’s a Jewish restaurant. I think it’s in North York. Somebody shot at it in the middle of the night. Because the owners are Jewish and they support Israel.”

“What’s it called?”

“Old Avenue Restaurant.”

“Never heard of it. What kind of food?”

W. plugs the question into her phone. “It says: Southern Caucasus cuisine.”

“What kind of food is that?”

W. shrugs, looking defeated. “I mean, still,” she says. “They shouldn’t shoot at it…”

As part of the lead up to her Bat Mitzvah, Kid #2 assists with the work of a local Toronto charity initiative called Ve’ahavta, a Jewish Response to Homelessness. Among other things, Ve’ahavta sends a van around Toronto offering the homeless hot meals and drinks and essential sundries like clean socks, sleeping bags, toothbrushes and sanitary pads.

Kid #2 and I ride the van together, though I mostly hang back, watching as she hands out sandwiches and cookies. Her calm efficiency is impressive, considering she is amongst crowds of people suffering from unimaginable struggles with drugs, mental illness and all the ensuing byproducts of society’s unwillingness to truly grapple with what neoliberal urban sprawl means for those left behind.

Weeks before, the Ve’Havata van and charity—a humanistic organization that helps all —came under attack by so-called Palestinian activists. Throughout May at least one individual claiming to be striking a blow for freedom of the besieged in the Middle East followed around the van, trying to impede the work of the outreach workers and volunteers. In another blow against the global Jewish conspiracy, Ve’ahavata was sent hateful antisemitic messages. Meanwhile, blocks away from the extremely modest Ve’havata headquarters an all-girls religious Jewish school had bullets pumped into its door in the middle of the night. From the river to the sea! If not now, when?

My daughter is no angel and most of the time is primarily concerned with three things: what her friends are doing, where the packages she ordered online are (In progress? Shipped? Hidden on the porch???), and what I’m making for dinner. But the Ve’ahavta experience stays with her. This is what someone addicted to fentanyl and living on the streets of Toronto looks like. This is what a family of six refugees, dark-skinned, hair covered, no English, living in a single motel room in Scarbrough, looks like; veiled young women with babies on their hips, armed with no language by which to acquit themselves in the Canadian context, they talk to Kid #2 with their gestures, their sad eyes, with the steely grips they retain on their older children’s hands.

We take a trip to Belize. It’s us and Kid #2. My parents, in their eighties, are supposed to go too, but my dad has developed the latest in an infamous string of strange health problems. In this case, the radiation treatment he received to successfully kill his throat cancer, though he never smoked and wasn’t all that much of a drinker, has now produced a dying jaw. He’s in constant pain and having a hard time eating. My parents stay home awaiting news on possible treatment. They take turns fixating on the dire outcomes of my dad’s condition, and the dire situation of the hostages in Gaza.

So we arrive as two frazzled adults and a thirteen-year-old eager to tan. We set up on Ambergris Caye, the largest of this small Central American country’s islands and the terminus of the Yucatan peninsula. In the island’s only town there is a café called Marbucks. We don’t go there. The town is ramshackle and funny, with random dogs running in and out of the traffic that is primarily made up of golf carts. There are various tourist shops ranging from well-lit and air conditioned to dark, hot and dusty. Prompted by two little sisters I wander into a shop run by their mother and we randomly buy something simply to support this hapless store. “Mister,” one of the sisters says to me. The other little kid holds up a magnet portraying the seashore. Both collapse in giggles.

The next day we go snorkeling with a man who says his name is Eddie Lover. For some reason I start referring to him as Tony Love. He taxis us out to a reef area called The Mexican Rocks and we float around. We are strangers here, in this underwater home of grey snapper, hog fish, gar, flounder, an impressively relaxed sea turtle and a rather put upon bright green moray eel. It’s all very beautiful. I surface and rip my mask off -- “Tony! Tony Love! Is that a shark?” Our guide looks around, confused. My body as an alien thing, a floating skin bag of air longing more than anything for a beer. On the way home, Kid #2 throws up.

Back at our blissful rental, I pace the second-floor deck then, trying to get myself to relax, settle on a comfortable chair with my laptop and a Belikin stout (the delicious local beer). I get online just in time to watch the coverage of Hamas returning the bodies of the two baby brothers they murdered on October 7. These are the red-headed Bibas brothers, three and nine-months old. Hamas also killed their mother.

That evening, to distract ourselves, we put on a feelgood movie about the rescue of a Thai soccer team trapped in a flooded cave system. It’s an incredible story. Thousands of people from Thailand, Australia, the UK and the US come together to rescue all 12 youngsters and their coach.

I can’t help but think back to those two little red-haired Jewish kids that Hamas kidnapped and murdered. There was no international coalition aimed at their rescue. In many places, including my country, it was the opposite: there were protests praising the kidnappers and lamenting attempts to rescue the hostages.

It’s Yom Kippur, the day of repentance and fasting. Here in the diaspora, there is a sense of rising dread. The holidays, post October 7. Something bad is going to happen, we all know. The only question is when and where.

Then the question is answered. While we North American Jews sleep a man by the name of Jihad al-Shamie, a 35-year-old born in Syria, decides to commemorate the occasion by driving a car into a group of people outside the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation, a synagogue in the quiet suburb of Higher Crumpsall just outside the city of Manchester. After driving into the crowd and badly injuring someone, al-Shamie moves into stabbing mode, killing one person and injuring several others before he is finally shot and killed by police. Sad news for a sad day. By the time we wake up, they are already celebrating the attack on the streets of London.

How much longer will this go on? Forever, I guess? Blaming the Jews is back in fashion. It’s their own fault for oppressing the peaceful Gazans and running the world’s financial system according to our secret protocols. For us, it’s Groundhog Day. Every day is Munich, 1936. Every day they are chasing my uncle through the Siberian winter in hopes of landing a blow on the only Jewish boy in town.

Between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, Israel, the US and unlikely ally Qatar announce a new peace plan for Gaza. Every Jew I know from (almost) every political persuasion spends Yom Kippur in prayer. Prayer that Hamas takes the offer. The end of the war. A rebuilt Gaza governed by an international body. Give us back our hostages, emaciated and beaten, murdered and tortured, dead or alive. That’s all we want.

On Yom Kippur, Kid #2 stays home from high school. The family fasts. Kid #2 asks me for help getting an assignment done. We spend an hour together researching the causes and effects of wildfires. The scale is incomprehensible. A single careless flick of a cigarette butt. Thousands of kilometres burnt to the ground.

I get a call around eight at night. It’s my mother. She tells me my brother is at Sunnybrook Health in the emergency room. He’s had a brain bleed. By the time I get to the hospital the next day my brother has been moved out of emergency to a neurology ICU on the 3^rd floor of a complex that stretches several city blocks wide. He is awake, sort of, and conscious, sort of. He has a catheter and keeps saying he needs to pee. He does not know where he is or why he is there. He’s not hungry—a rarity for the big man. He is thirsty but is not supposed to drink due to some upcoming test to figure out what the hell is going on with him. I stand at the edge of the hospital bed. “I need to pee,” my brother mumbles for the third time since I got there. The nurses are at another bed yelling “Mr. Hakim open your eyes. Wake up Mr. Hakim! Open your eyes Mr. Hakim!” That their sole medical intervention seems to be poking poor Mr. Hakim in the ribs is not at all comforting. As my brother drifts in and out of awareness, I shift from foot to foot, fumble with the contents of my pockets—car keys, phone—and wait. For him to wake up. For him to come to his senses.

Nothing of the sort happens. A few hours later, hungry and tired and worried, I creep along with the ever-present traffic. South down the long-congested Yonge Street corridor on my way back home from the hospital. I feel besieged and angry. Rageful. I knew this was coming. It was too much for my brother, with his kids in Israel, with his obsession with Jewish history; in every speech, every masked protestor waving the Hamas flag, he sees it: the past and its many precedents. I should have tried harder to snap him out of it. You can’t spend your days brooding and worrying about and obsessing. I swear that if he recovers, I will redouble my efforts. I will speak out against the madness, the groups trying to defund Jewish camps, decertify Jewish schools, demonize Canadian Jews like my niece and nephews who moved to Israel and completed their mandatory service in the military. But by the time I near Lawrence Avenue, my fervour has already passed. Do I, past middle-age and on the praecipe looking down at the new Hebraic promised land of senior discounts, early bird suppers and MAID, really have to wrestle with all this, plus whatever is going on with my brother? A secular artist with a penchant for scotch and naps, I’m hardly the man for the job, I tell myself.

I pass a sign in front of a synagogue: “If not now, when?” The ancient scholar Hillel’s famous saying. Hillel who came to Jerusalem from some distant part of the wide-ranging Babylonian empire, a grown man, forty-plus, he longed to study. But he was a pauper, too broke to pay the fees. He climbed fences, learned to eavesdrop before finally being recognized as a master of Jewish thought, his sayings still pondered today. “Pee…” my brother muttered. “Go back to sleep,” I told him. “You’re tired.”

I’m tired too. I feel like events are outpacing my capacity to make meaning with words. There are still 53 hostages in Gaza. I’m reminded of them almost every day. My brother lying in the ICU. “Code Blue,” someone announced calmly over a loudspeaker while I stood vigil over my brother. I double-checked his breathing. He was okay. Just sleeping.

Almost home. If not you, then who? It’s not long till dusk, but the sun has come out, warming the winter day with bright sunshine. I squint at the road ahead. Ten more minutes. My back hurts, from driving or standing, I’m in my fifties now, the age when your back hurts just from going about your life, the age when your parents start seriously dying and your brother has a bleed in his big round fat head. Anyway, it’s not his fault. It’s history, asking for more than we can give. Once, Hashem sent an angel to wrestle Jacob, younger brother of far more vital firstborn son Esau, from whom he had stolen his father Isaac’s blessing. The angel and Jacob battle all night. I think of my brother and I, the wrestling match against the intangible we’ve been engaged in all our lives. Are we winning? Losing? Who’s to say?

Dawn crests and Jacob refuses to relent. He doesn’t win, he isn’t winning. He just keeps holding on, no matter what. He wrestles with God until God’s emissary gives in to Joseph’s demand for a blessing. A blessing from God. Then it is done. The angel sent by Hashem releases Jospeh from his grip. He blesses him and renames him. He renames him Israel.

Coming Next Week: Part 3: All the Simchas in the World featuring Hal in the Twitter wars, Iranian Bobby’s fabulous jumping doggie and so much more!