Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(180)
There was time, there was suddenly a life of it, and Jacob’s needs were taking the shape of his needs, rather than his ability to fulfill them. He was declaring his independence, and all of it—from the interminable wait for the hot-water Messiah to the unflush plate through which not enough threads of the cable nipple were exposed—filled him with hope. Or a version of hope. Jacob might have forced her hand, but it was Julia who chose the separation. And while his return from Islip could be understood as the claiming of an identity, it could at least as easily be understood as the forfeiture of one. So maybe he didn’t write his declaration of independence, but he was happy to sign it. It was a version of happiness.
Forty-two is young, he kept telling himself, like an idiot. He could hear his own idiocy loud and clear, and yet he couldn’t stop announcing it. He would remind himself of advances in medical technology, of his own efforts to eat less unhealthily, of the gym to which he had a membership (albeit ceremonial), and of that fact Sam had once shared: with each passing year, life expectancy increases by a year. Everyone who didn’t smoke would live to be one hundred. Practitioners of yoga would outlive Moses.
In time, his house would resemble his home—some rugs, better hardware, wall colors in keeping with the Geneva Convention, paintings and photos and lithos, calming lamplight, art books stacked on surfaces, throws not thrown but crisply folded and laid over sofas and chairs, maybe a wood-burning stove in the corner. And in time, everything that was possible would be actual. He’d get a girlfriend, or not. Buy an unexpected car, or probably not. Finally do something with the television show he’d been emptying his soul into for more than a decade. (The soul being the only thing that requires dispersal to accumulate.) Now that he no longer needed to protect his grandfather, he’d stop writing the bible and get back to the show itself. He’d take it to one of those producers who used to be interested in what he was doing, back when he was doing things that could be shared. A lot of time had passed, but they’d still remember him.
There had been more than one reason to keep the pages in a drawer—he wasn’t only protecting others. But once there was nothing left to lose, even Julia would see that the show wasn’t an escape from the challenges of family life, but a redemption of his family’s destruction.
Israel wasn’t destroyed—at least not in the literal sense. It remained a Jewish country, with a Jewish army, and borders only negligibly different from before the earthquake. Infinite debate corkscrewed the question of whether those new borders were good for the Jews. Although, tellingly, the expression most often used by American Jews was good for the Israelis. And that, the Israelis thought, was bad for the Jews.
Israel had been made weaker, but its enemies were made weaker still. Not much comfort can be taken, when sifting through your rubble with a bulldozer, in the knowledge that your enemy is sifting through his rubble by hand. But some comfort can be taken. As Isaac would have said, “It could be worse.” No, he would have said, “It is worse.”
Maybe he was right. Maybe it was worse to have survived, if continuing to be required destroying the reason to be. It’s not as if American Jews stopped caring. They continued to vacation and bar mitzvah and find themselves in Israel. They winced as their small cuts were first touched by Dead Sea water, winced as their hearts were first touched by “Hatikvah,” crammed folded wishes between the rubble of the Wailing Wall, recounted back-alley hummus spots, recounted the thrill of distant rocket strikes, winced as their eyes were first touched by the sun at Masada, recounted the perpetual thrill of seeing Jewish garbagemen, and Jewish firefighters, and Jewish homeless. But the feeling of having arrived, of finally finding a place of comfort, of being home, was disappearing.
For some, it was the inability to forgive Israel’s actions during the war—even a massacre or two would have been easier to accept than the complete and explicit abdication of responsibility for non-Jews—the withdrawal of security forces and emergency personnel, the stockpiling of medical supplies that had urgent use elsewhere, the withholding of utilities, the rationing of food even amid a surplus, the blockade of aid shipments to Gaza and the West Bank. Irv—whose once-daily, occasionally inflammatory blog had become a rushing river of provocation—defended Israel at every step: “If it were a family in a time of emergency, and not a country, no one would judge parents for keeping food in the fridge and Band-Aids in the medicine cabinet. Things happen, especially when your death-loving neighbors hate you to death, and it is not unethical to care more about your own children.”
“If the family lived only in its own house, you might almost be right,” Jacob said. “And you might almost be right if every family were equally able to give preferential treatment to its own. But that’s not the world we live in, and you know it.”
“It’s the world they created.”
“When you look at that girl, Adia, your heart doesn’t go out to her?”
“Of course it does. But like every heart, mine is of limited size, and if it came down to Adia or Benjy, I would pull the food from her hands to put into his. I’m not even arguing that that’s right or good. I’m just saying it isn’t bad, because it isn’t a choice. ‘Ought implies can,’ right? To be morally obliged to do something, you have to be able to do it. I love Noam, Yael, and Barak, but I cannot love them as much as I love Sam, Max, and Benjy. It’s impossible. And I love my friends, but I can’t love them as much as I love my family. And believe it or not, I am fully capable of loving Arabs, but not of loving them as much as I love Jews. These are not choices.”