We Are Not In This Alone

A special edition of Substack Safari; or, how to breathe in the world

The other night, I wrote the letter “kaf” in a digital Torah scroll. Sefaria, the online library of Jewish texts that has reimagined Torah study in the biggest way since, maybe, Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi codified the oral tradition in ancient Babylon, is running a campaign to create a digital scroll “written” by Jews from across the world. You pick your font, they generate the next letter in the text, and send you a copy of the verse.

My verse is from the aftermath of the flood. Noah’s leaving the ark, and God makes the covenant with him and all the creatures who were on the ark that there will never be a devastating flood like that again.

All the creatures. The birds, the domestic animals, the wild beasts. They don’t have to worry.

How apropos that the verse I “co-wrote” would be about one of my biggest passions - making sure animals don’t go extinct.

But also, this was the exact reminder I needed to hear yesterday. The news out of Israel and Gaza just keeps getting worse. This war is exhausting¹, and I say that as someone fighting on the very back lines of the internet war, not as someone being held hostage for 234 days, or a civilian in Rafah, or bombarded by rocket attacks like my friends and family in Israel. Not even as someone like Eve Barlow, fighting on the front lines online.

The body keeps the score

There are days when it feels like the world is just too small to contain the amount of hate and grief and despair. When I wake up and wonder how I can be a Jew in a world where that’s the worst insult you can sling at someone, where I feel like I have to second guess everything I say, write, or do related to my Judaism lest I get attacked, physically or verbally, in the new culture of rising antisemitism in the US. Many people in my life will say, “Well, it’s time to move to Israel,” and I get that, but also…there’s an active war there. While it’s maybe “better” to be surrounded by fellow Jews, let’s not kid ourselves that’s it’s the easy, carefree, antisemitism-free haven our people have been longing for for millennia.

We live in a world where the polarization is so deep and the misinformation so rampant that humans turn a blind eye to teenage women who were (and, assuming they are still alive, likely continue to be) raped as part of a tactic of war. The humans who see the women are so enraged that they can’t hold the devastation of a fire that killed displaced civilians. The loudest voices apologize and make excuses and rationalizations for “our side,” and the rest of us are wondering: is this the broken world we must live in? Is there a reset button?

Maybe we could use a flood.

But the world is bigger than just humanity’s brokenness. We are not alone here. We are here with creatures great and small, who aren’t suffocated by the war.

Animals aren’t worried about rising fascism across the globe. They aren’t panicking about AI taking their jobs, or the lack of childcare access in America, or the rising cost of living, or immigration crisis, or increased hate and violence, or even the decline of peak TV. They aren’t even worried about climate change, though they should be.

The animals — in the ark then, and scattered around the earth now — live beside us on this planet but they don’t inhabit the same world we do. I don’t know what it would be like to be in a herd of oryx on the African plains, organizing my day around the circle we sit in to protect each other from predators, waiting to be tipped off by the lookout giraffes whose contributions I don’t necessarily realize. I can’t imagine being with a part of a troop of Hamadryas babboons, walking 8 miles a day to find food, raising babies as part of a harem.

Dogs. Cows. Lions. Chipmunks. Monkeys. Vultures. The animals we’ve heard of, but don’t — can’t — understand. They are right here breathing our same air, not realizing the world is on fire. Because even when wildfires devastate, or habitats get destroyed, it’s not global annihilation. The covenant is with us all. Our world might shift or change or even stop, but the world is not ending. It cannot.

When my world starts to close in, I think about the other worlds that I can never understand, and that gives me hope.

No matter what happens next to the Jews, you can bet the Malabar giant squirrel won’t be affected.

Photo courtesy of VinodBhattu

Or the Blue Tree Monitor.

The Panamanian golden frog is a whole world away from those guys, and me.

Photo courtesy of Ltshears

The Western world that doesn’t recognize itself anymore didn’t even know about Okapi until 1887. That’s how far removed we are.

Photo courtesy of Daniel Jolivet

The world is full of miracles in its wildlife. Somehow, we’re all here together, and yet not together at all. We’re not crammed in an ark watching a terrible global catastrophe unfold.

A terrible global catastrophe is unfolding, yes. But it’s nothing to the squirrel, the lizard, the frog, the okapi, the baboon, the oryx, the lion, the pangolin, the rhino, the dog, the cow, the zebra, the platypus, the wallaby, the fox, the coati.

As long as they can breathe a sigh of relief, so can we.