Of beginnings
After October 7, for months, I couldn’t read anything. My brain was frozen. I couldn’t pick up a book, read more than two sentences, and find meaning in them. You may think: so what? After all, many people go through years without reading much, and still enjoy a good life. But I’m a member of a rare species, who loves books over anything else. I don’t only read them: I chase them, I collect them, I store them. My current library contains (it’s a rough estimate) 4,000 to 5,000 volumes. I love books so much that they make up most of my work life. I’m a writer and a reader. I write books (some were even modestly successful), and I read them, working in foreign right acquisitions for a French publisher.
So imagine my distress when, after weeks of sirens, and bombs exploding above my head, I realized that I couldn’t read anything. I couldn’t sit, open a book, and read more than a paragraph. I wondered: is it temporary? Or is there something in me that broke, and that will never be fixed again?
During these months, I could also barely watch anything either. No movies, no documentaries, no classes. The only channel I watched was by a British bard, who records videos, sitting in his office, surrounded by books. Malcom Guite talks mostly about poetry and the legend of King Arthur and The Lord of the Rings. For months, this was my only contact with art, with beauty, and with a sense that something, outside of this war, could be worth reading.
On one of my shelves, I had a few copies of the Lord of the Rings. I bought them in a thrift store when I was living in the US. In fact, I had bought several copies of each volume. Hardcovers and paperbacks, because I collect books, and I thought it would be nice to have different versions of this classic.
I had never read it before. Not that I hadn’t tried. I must have been twelve or thirteen when, during a trip to the library, my mom added a book to my stack, saying, “your uncle used to love this, you should give it a try”. I read a few pages, about hobbits, and how they behaved and smoked, and skipped to the first chapter, only to read about a party that was thrown for someone’s birthday. After twenty or thirty pages, I gave up. It felt as if it wasn’t going anywhere.
A few years later, I gave it another try, but this time, it was in the shape of movie, a long, long movie, with symphonic music and images that looked like paintings, sprawling on the silver screen. I liked them. I like the stories, I liked the actors, I like the themes. I tried the books again, this time in English. I was in my twenties, and my English wasn’t good enough. The vocabulary was too complex, the rhythm of the sentences too difficult to follow. Again, after a few pages, I gave up.
Fast forward some twenty-five years. I live in the Negev, in Be’er Sheva, in the South of Israel. The year is 2023. I’ve been living there with my family for three years. And we have already been through two small wars with Gaza, in 2021, and in 2022.
But on October 7, 2023, at six thirty, when the first siren screamed across Be’er Sheva, something felt different. The other times, there was some sort of warning, a tension that built up in the previous days, a tension that resolved itself in war. War was in the air, , but not on October 6. That night , we had friends over for dinner. We celebrated Simhat Torah, the day when we finish the Torah and start reading it again, the day where we dance with the scrolls, with the teaching that we carried through the millennium, and that carried us along the way, the teaching that God gave us, to show the world how to better the place He created. The next morning, not long after sunrise, the enemy attacked us, in a way that was both planned and vicious.
My family and I spent most of the day in the mamad, the protected room that we had in our apartment. During that day, hamas shot over 4,000 rockets at Israel, and massacred over 1,200 people, mostly Israelis, and mostly Jews.
That night, I started writing. There was nothing else I could do, there was nothing else I knew how to do anyway. I took my keyboard, and I wrote. I told, in a very simple way, what was happening. What we saw, what we knew, what we lived through. As civilians, living in the largest city of Southern Israel, only 40 kilometers away from Gaza. With friends living by the border, less than a kilometer away from Gaza. With friends putting on the uniform and being called to duty. But not me, having passed 40 already, and having immigrated too old. So, I wrote, every day, for over a year, and writing was the only thing that I could do, while our soldiers were fighting a war on multiple fronts, while the world was turning its back on Jews once more.
I could write, but I couldn’t read.
Until finally, I picked up a copy of the Lord of the Rings and started reading. Slowly, slowly, very slowly. One sentence at a time, one paragraph at a time. At first, half a page was a victory. Deciphering the words and making sense of the way they fit together felt like learning to read again. After a few weeks, I would read a couple of pages a day. Still slowly, but by design this time. Because in the pages of this story of how Frodo went there and back again, I found more than an epic. I found the manual for living in the times I was living in.
I didn’t take too long to reach the paragraph that gave me the certitude that this was the book that I would walk with for the next months, maybe the next years, as the war kept stretching and stretching across time and space. It was right there, in the second chapter, when Gandalf tells Frodo:
“Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again.’
‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo.
‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
There I found friends who knew what we were going through.
Finally, I could read again.