Who By Social Media, Yom Kippur, 2024
by Jamie Beth Cohen

Jews around the world are currently in The Days of Awe, a period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur when we take stock of our lives and our actions and reach out to those we may have harmed to ask forgiveness.

The past year has been brutal for a lot of us (not just American Jews, but that is my particular lived experience). My brutal is not important except to me and those who love me. The fact is, I’m safe and so are most of the people closest to me. All of my family’s basic needs are met (and then some). I can travel freely. I can celebrate milestones. I can make and spend money how I see fit. I’ve done all of those things over the past year, so my brutal is small and insignificant in the face of war.

What I’ve personally endured this year because of the ongoing and spreading war in the Middle East is minor in the grand scheme of things. I was cut off by a friend (after our latest in a long running string of disagreements regarding Israel/Palestine) and then watched as she posted derogatory things aimed at me and people who think like me; I’ve been watching from afar as people have been dehumanized and killed, whole families wiped out, some “in my name” and some who look a lot like me. What I have experienced as a result of the current war is not unique or interesting. What I have learned might be.

From the very early hours of Oct 8th in the U.S., as news was coming across my social feeds, the brutal had already begun and it included an attack at an all-night music festival (like the raves my brother and I used to throw) in the desert in Israel (like my husband attended when he lived there).  

I know the profound joy that overtakes party goers in the early morning hours when the exhaustion of dancing all night mixes with the endorphins. I know how surreal the sun seems, how in love with your friends and the music you are at first light. I had trouble in October of 2023 and I have trouble now trying to imagine that moment being punctuated by gunfire, attackers, trucks, helicopters, rage, and violence. Instead, I remember my friends, when we were in our twenties, in rented dance halls and warehouse night clubs, all inhibitions gone as we stumbled onto a city street looking for a cab or something to eat. I think about my husband in the Israeli desert after a night of partying with famous DJs, concerned only with how he’d get back to Jerusalem. I try to imagine being at Nova, or more likely these days, being the parent of a kid at Nova. My brain, for all its ability to imagine grand things in detail (I am a fiction writer, after all) can’t go there.

As the news came out on my feed that morning last October, I told my husband what I was learning.

“They do this every so often,” he said. “They want a prisoner swap.” The “they” he was referring to was an amorphous group of any of a number of Arab terrorist groups in the region who had done such things in the past. 

I remember being alarmed by his casual tone that morning (there was so much we didn’t know at that point), but also being comforted by it. I thought back the string of summers several years ago when my feeds were just endless pictures of friends’ vacation photos punctuated by news of some attack on Israel or aggression from Israel. Was this just going to be another thing we heard about a for a few weeks, knowing full well that the news coverage would die down, but the violence would continue. Would it be like all those other times I could hide in my sense of safety created by a secular life as a U.S. Jew? Like when my daughter was a baby and her crying, as broadcast by the baby monitor, would raise my blood pressure and rattle my brain. And sometimes, I would just turn off the monitor and breathe for a moment in the quiet, just enough to lower my BP for a few moments, before I went to comfort her. Or maybe it would be like the suicide bombings of my youth when Israeli shuks or pizza places or bus stops were targeted, and, after each newscast or “60 Minutes” segment, my father would remind me that there’s no stopping anyone who’s willing to die just to take you out? Would this just be more of the same? Weeks of heightened terror in the news followed by terror I didn’t see or hear unless I sought it out?

Obviously, a year later, we know he couldn’t have been more wrong. The violence and terror perpetrated that morning and everything that has come since has been front and center in the news and in the lives of so many people in the Middle East, here in the U.S., and across the globe. I can’t imagine being a hostage, the parent of a hostage, or anyone who has lived in danger, squalor, and terror since. I’ve tried. It’s beyond me. As I try to make sense of what I read or hear on the news, I am overwhelmed by the brutal, especially the brutal I can do nothing to soothe, no matter how much I donate and to who.

So, what can I do? Maybe, on this day before Yom Kippur, I can pass on a lesson I am long overdue in learning. Maybe I can ask forgiveness, too.

As I’ve watched the war in the Middle East play out on my social fields, I’ve learned most of us are woefully underinformed about things we claim to know a lot about. That probably seems obvious to anyone who has ever been on Facebook, but do you consider yourself to be in that camp? Or do you think you’re “one of the good ones?” I know before the war, I thought I knew of what I posted, now, I’m not so sure.

In some circles, there has been what seems like a directive to post. If you don’t post about the war, you don’t care, and if you post the “wrong” thing about the war, that’s worse. As an anti-racist, secular Jew, my feed over the past year has been about ½ people who never post about the war, ¼ people, mostly Jews, some not, who post in support of the Palestinian people, and ¼ people, mostly Jews, who post in support of the people of Israel. To be clear, no one on my feed posts in support of the Israeli government or Hamas. Which isn’t to say that isn’t happening, but which is to say, my feed is made up of people who want peace and have very different ideas of how to achieve that, how we got here, and who is to blame.

As lives are lost, bodies are harmed, and communities are devastated,

I have watched as each “side” claims the “facts,” “truth,” and “history” are theirs as they stake out the “moral high ground.”

I have watched rabbis I respect and trust post vastly different takes on the same events.

I have watched educated people who have studied the region and the cultures disagree on the most basic facts.

I have seen disagreements between friends on the definitions of “genocide,” “pogrom,” “terrorist,” “fascist,” “Zionist", “Anti-Zionist,” and more.

I have seen people debate the spelling and punctuation of “Anti-Semitism” and ascribe meaning to those things.

 It is through my social media feeds and the current war in the Middle East that I have learned more about rhetoric, propaganda, and misinformation, than any other thing I’ve experienced in my fifty years. It seems, on this one issue, I am not in an echo chamber of like-minded people. It is in watching two groups of Jews, or rather, an infinite number of Jews with an infinite number of positions, that I have come to terms with all the ways I have screwed up things in the past: by thinking I knew more than I did;

by confirmation bias;

by quoting others whose biases I didn’t interrogate or understand;

by being a purist when it came to language; and

by imposing litmus tests that narrowed complex issues to razor thin margins.

As I take stock of the global politics of the last year, it seems no good has come from any of it. And when I think about the amends I need to make and the forgiveness I need to seek, my whole history on social media—more than 25 years of a digital footprint full of mistakes and misdeeds—stands out in stark relief.

Even this, something I’ve worked on for days and thought seriously about, is hubris. I know it is not complete. I know writing anything about war when you haven’t experienced war is shallow. I know that centering my own experience in the face of war is absurd. And yet, I write to understand what I can, even if it’s not nearly enough.

My dad used to say America fought wars every generation to teach its population geography. He said it wearily, knowing the lesson was certainly not worth the cost. Apparently I’m still learning things from war, things that are certainly not worth the cost, things many people learned ages ago, things some people may still need to learn.

And so, I ask the social media universe for forgiveness, I wonder if I can change my ways, and I wish for a better 5785, where all families have the simple privileges mine does.