So many deaths. So many tears. So many questions.

How can people call for war when Palestinian children are dying? How can I pray for peace when Israeli children were murdered?

Israel has cut off food, water and electricity to the Gaza Strip. How can President Biden condone that? People who’ve been to Gaza say it is a prison. But if Hamas is in charge of Gaza, how can the people there ever get a better life?

The world’s Jews need a safe place to live after thousands of years of exile, the Crusades, pogroms, the Holocaust. Yet people already lived in the land of Israel in 1948, albeit many of them Jews. Jews have lived there for thousands of years. Yet so have Palestinians.

Why didn’t the Palestinians take the land offered to them in 1948? Because they wanted all the land, some say. But so do many Jews. Isn’t that why Israeli Jews continue to settle on Palestinian land in the West Bank?

Why do so many Progressives hate Israel? Why were people in New York City cheering as bombs fell on Israeli cities?

Friends and colleagues ask me how I’m doing. I am not sure.

I attended a very moving vigil on Wednesday night at my synagogue. The room was packed. I cried for the first time since hearing the news of the massacre on Saturday. Big, wet tears like I hadn’t cried in ages. More than I cried when my mother died, when my father died. Tears for people I’d never met. Yet tears for my brothers and sisters.

I don’t have family in Israel, I told a friend at the vigil. Yet all Jews have family in Israel, I added quickly. Why was my heart breaking? I could have just as easily asked why it took so long to break.

I don’t want Palestinians to die. But I want Israelis to be safe. For without a place for Jews to live in peace and safety, how can I ever feel safe as a Jew in this world?

So many wars. So many dead on both sides. Why do I feel so conflicted? Who wouldn’t? How can so many call for war when so many questions remain? Yet how can I call for peace when so many Jews have been killed? In Germany, in Poland, in Pittsburgh, in Israel.

So many questions. So many deaths. So many tears. The world has not been kind to the Jews. Yet one could say the same about the Palestinians. Pawns in a game of chess played by Arab states for so long.

These words run together yet my face is dry, for I have no more tears. I have only sadness and anger and revenge and hatred. Hatred of Hamas. Hatred of Netanyahu. Hatred of a government that could do this to another people. Hatred of the fact that maybe Jews can never live in peace in the Middle East.

And I also feel a deep love for the idea of Israel. Love for the hope that Jews and Palestinians can live some day in peace. But I don’t think it will happen. And no tanks or bombs can make it happen. For war will not bring peace.

So what can I do? I have no idea. Thoughts and prayers aren’t going to help anyone. And no one is going to listen to me anyway. So I will go on with my life. But will I be able to live as I did before Saturday? Will this bitter taste in my mouth ever wash away? Do I have survivor’s guilt? Why was I so lucky to be born in the U.S.A.?

The questions don’t stop coming. But questions aren’t bullets and I am safe. Safe in Colorado, far from the fighting. And yet my heart is in Jerusalem. My heart is also in Gaza. They said, “Never again.” Was anyone listening?