Three years later, this is the first anniversary of October 7th in which no living or deceased hostages remain in Gaza.
For the first time, survivors and families can grieve their losses without also fighting for the return of those still being held.
And yet, somehow, the fight still feels ever-present.
Just 12 minutes from my home, liberal organizations—organizations I believe in, organizations I have believed stand against terrorism, against children being torn from their mothers, against human beings being put into cages—are celebrating the deaths of 1,200 innocent people.
And maybe they do stand against terror. Just not when the victims are Jews.
How is it that we still have to fight for the right to grieve?
How is it that rape, murder, torture, and the killing of babies can be celebrated in the City of Brotherly Love as resistance?
I read Rachel Goldberg Polin’s words about remaining broken and heartbroken, about not believing she will ever be healed. She speaks of the before and the after. I don't know—and I truly cannot imagine—her experience. That pain is not mine to claim. It is a depth of despair no person should ever have to know, a darkness that should never have existed in the first place.
But I understand something about the feeling she describes: the feeling that there may be no going back. That there is a before, and there is an after, and that the two can never again be made whole.
That feeling is painfully present today.
How do you heal the unhealable? How do you heal while other people celebrate the thing that broke you?
How do you mourn when what you have lost is being called something worth resisting?
How do you grieve when the people you loved are reduced to politics, when their lives become part of an argument, and when your grief itself is treated as something you have to defend?
Did you know, it would take 40 minutes just to say the names of the 1,200 people murdered three years ago today? Forty minutes to speak each name.Forty minutes to remember that every name was a life. A mother. A father. A child. A friend. A person who was loved.
Twelve hundred people murdered means hundreds of thousands of people left carrying the absence of someone they loved. It would take 17 days to recite the names of all the people who are missing someone from their lives because of that day.
And still, the numbers do not capture it. Because grief does not stop at a number.
It ripples outward—through families, through friendships, through communities, through generations.
nd somewhere inside those hundreds of thousands of names is an entire people being forced to confront something that is bile in our throats:
While we are trying to remember the people we lost, there are people celebrating their deaths.
Celebrating, not mourning them. Not grieving them. Celebrating that they are gone.
People who hate Jews enough to celebrate the murder, rape, torture, and kidnapping of other human beings simply because they are Jewish.
There is no political sophistication in that. There is no moral complexity in celebrating the slaughter of innocent people. There is only hatred.
And in that hatred, we are reminded—not only of who we lost, but of how unsafe, how hated, and how alone we can still feel.
Three years later, I want to believe there can be room for grief without qualification.
Room to mourn the beautiful souls we lost.
Room to remember them as people.
Room for the families who will carry their absence forever.
Room for survivors who will never be the people they were before.
And perhaps, most of all, room for us to say they mattered at all.
Because they did.
They were human beings.
They were loved.
They had names.
They had lives.
And their deaths do not become less horrific because someone has decided to call their murder an act of resistance.
The demonization and dehumanization of a people and a place is what has always led to the flood.
It begins when people stop seeing human beings as human.
And I am fucking tired of being asked to prove that ours were.
