The Editor's Blog: The Fear Between Us

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

We are born with fear. We grow in fear. We die in fear.

At sunset last Saturday, when Shabbat ended, I opened my phone and the first news that came to my eyes was: Massacre in a synagogue in Pittsburgh.

It was only a few hours ago that an armed man had invaded that area filled with Jews during a sacred celebration: the bris. A newborn was to be circumcised.

The man was not a Muslim, he was not a Hispanic, he was not an immigrant, he was not a black, he was not a religious. The killer was a white man born in the United States, the son of other white men born in the United States, the land of freedom, of democracy.

I was not in any place when I read the news. She was in Israel, in the so-called Holy Land. It has just emerged from the waters of the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth, with the Jordanian hills in front, where you could breathe infinite peace.

The night before we had celebrated Shabbat at the home of an Orthodox Jewish family who had opened the doors of their home to strangers, regardless of what religion they practiced or even whether they were atheists or agnostics.

We lived in an illusory bubble. Because Israel is that, an illusion, an oasis in the heart of the Middle East. A small, almost invisible point on the map, which has already survived 70 years of war and hostilities. Israel is the only true democracy in the area, in search of peace, where Christians, Jews and Muslims can survive and pray.

The day before, I had presented my novel The German Girl at the prestigious Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Of all the presentations I've done around the world, this was the most special one. First because it was in Israel, the afternoon after visiting the Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum, and because in the audience were two children of one of the survivors of the Saint Louis ship, the tragedy of the 937 Jewish refugees fleeing from Germany. Nazi in 1939, they were rejected by the governments of Cuba, the United States, and Canada. Most of those passengers ended up in the Auschwitz death camp. The German girl is based on that event that many prefer to forget.

Writing The German girl for more than 10 years was a kind of relief for me. It was like trying to overcome all fears: the fear of being an immigrant, the fear of being rejected, the fear of creating a family with two parents. My 12-year-old daughter Emma gave voice to Hannah and Anna, the protagonists of my novel: one in 1939 and the other in 2014. Introducing the story of these rejected families, in the heart of Jerusalem, it was truly cathartic, to knowing that these families, to which the world once turned its back, will forever have a country that accepts them.

There were with us the Hispanic actors Carmen Villalobos, Mane de la Parra, Carmen Aub and Sebastián Caicedo, invited by the recently created ILAN (Israel-Latin American Network), based in Mexico, and by American Voices in Israel.

But after living a few days of illusory peace, ten missiles were launched from Gaza against Israel, the siren was activated and they were intercepted by the effective Iron Dome air defense system. That night we went back to sleep in peace, at the foot of the walled city.

A few hours later, the Pittsburgh murderer called for the death of all the Jews in the world. It was not the first time, it will not be the last, but Israel exists and will exist so that this does not happen.

On the last night of that intense journey, I returned to the Wailing Wall to pray for the 11 murdered in Pittsburgh, for my children, for my family, for my friends, but more importantly, to eliminate the fear that corrodes us.

Because fear is something real, that fear that separates us: fear of the other, the one who has a different skin color, the one who believes in a different god, the one who has an accent, the one who has another sexual preference. What makes us monsters is fear of the other. The day we understand that we are all human beings, but at the same time we are all different, the day we learn to respect our differences, the world will be better.

Israel will always be there to remind us.

Shalom.