Between Aleph and Tav

When They Say Land Back

They told me to grieve for the world,
but not for my sisters.
Told me to chant the names of the dead,
but skip the ones who lit candles in Hebrew.

October split me open—
not like a blade,
but like the shofar’s cry
on the day you realize your friends
never saw you as fully human.

They said land back,
but not to the people who carried it in their mouths
for two thousand years of wandering.
Said believe her,
unless she’s crying in Hebrew.
Said no gods, no masters—
but their fists rose proud
for the Caliphate.

And me?
I am still scrubbing blood from the floorboards of my language.
Still whispering names
no one wants to remember.
Still dreaming of Kibbutz Re’im,
where laughter once danced barefoot
and now the silence grows like mold.

My leftist friends wear kaffiyehs
like second skins,
recite decolonial theory
like it’s Torah—
but their land acknowledgments
don’t stretch across oceans,
don’t touch the olive roots
watered by our weeping in Babylon.
They forget that.

I was a good Jew once—
quiet,
ashamed,
grateful to be invited to the protest.
But now I carry my rage
like tefillin at dawn—
wound tight, unshakable.
I am done apologizing for surviving.

Tell me again
how Hamas is resistance,
and I will show you the face of a girl
dragged by her hair from a bomb shelter
while you updated your Instagram story.

You don’t get to choose
which traumas are fashionable.
You don’t get to trade my dead
for your politics.

I am not sorry
that Zion lives in me
like marrow.
I am not sorry
that I know where I come from.

This land sings in our bones.
It called us home
before you had a word for diaspora.
And we returned—
not as conquerors,
but as orphans who never stopped hoping
the door would still be unlocked.

You say never again.
I believe you.
That’s why I carry a rifle in one hand
and a siddur in the other.

Because next time,
there will be no cattle cars.
No ghettos.
No silence.

Only us,
still breathing.
Still building.
Still Jewish.
Still here.

— Chaya Feldstein