My People

by Marcie Geffner (Ventura, CA)

I lay on the narrow exam table with “everything off” except the blue-and-white hospital gown tied at my neck and open to the back.

It was early morning in Los Angeles and I was hungry—empty, really—and tired from the clear liquid diet—apple juice, vegetable broth, ten lemon JELLOs—and the routine colonoscopy “prep” I’d endured the day before.

A surgical assistant approached me with a wristband.

Inwardly, I moaned. Did I have to do this? Answer: yes.

“Hold out your arm,” the assistant instructed. “Just think of this like you’re at a music concert.”

At my side, the stocky, dyed-blond nurse stiffened.

As did I.

It had been only four days since Hamas militants massacred two hundred and sixty people at a dance party in Israel’s Negev Desert. Israeli soldiers now stood guard at the site, strewn with mattresses, tents, food, clothing, and one militant’s dead body, left there as a warning. In Israel, 1,200 people were dead with another 2,800 wounded. In Gaza, the death toll surpassed 1,500. The war had only just begun.

Could anyone be as clueless as this surgical assistant seemed to be? Apparently so.

“That’s…maybe not the best comment right now,” I said.

The nurse murmured, “I am half-Russian, half-Ukrainian.” Her thickly accented voice came low, as if for my ears only.

She sounded like my grandmother. Born in Kishinev, my father’s mother immigrated first to Panama, then to Los Angeles as a young woman.

I was born Jewish and brought up Jewish. As a teenager, I’d spent one glorious, fearless summer in Israel, studying Hebrew, harvesting potatoes, traveling throughout the state and visiting my great-aunt and great-uncle, who lived part-time in Netanya.

Later, though, my feelings toward my religious heritage changed. As an atheist, I had no interest in prayer. As an adult without children, I felt marginalized, even unwelcome, in synagogue life. But I don’t celebrate Christmas, either. No Christmas tree. No Christmas lights. No Christmas cards. I’m an outsider in almost any religious space.

So why did this Hamas massacre in Eretz Yisrael feel so personal?

Because even without formal religion, I’m still a member of the tribe. I’m not always sure what that means, but I’ve never denied it and can’t imagine that I ever would. Jewish values, history and culture are visible threads woven through the fabric of my life. I don’t know whether I still have distant relatives in Israel, but really, everyone who lives there feels to me like my family. Those vicious attacks? Those people murdered? They could’ve been my loved ones. Or me.

I extended my arm toward the surgical assistant.

“I don’t watch all that stuff happening on the news,” she declared, as if “all that stuff” could not have been of less interest to her. Or to anyone.

She snapped the band around my wrist.

I withdrew my arm.

“It’s easy to look away,” I said, “when it’s not your people.”

Marcie Geffner is a writer, editor and book critic in Ventura, Calif. If you’d like to learn more about her and her work, visit her website: www.marciegeffner.com