This piece is part of our Wit­ness­ing series, which shares pieces from Israeli authors and authors in Israel, as well as the expe­ri­ences of Jew­ish writ­ers around the globe in the after­math of Octo­ber 7th.

It is crit­i­cal to under­stand his­to­ry not just through the books that will be writ­ten lat­er, but also through the first-hand tes­ti­monies and real-time account­ing of events as they occur. At Jew­ish Book Coun­cil, we under­stand the val­ue of these writ­ten tes­ti­mo­ni­als and of shar­ing these indi­vid­ual expe­ri­ences. It’s more impor­tant now than ever to give space to these voic­es and narratives.

Neg­a­tive Space

Mon­day after­noon, 2 March 2026 / 13 Adar 5786

The whole build­ing trembles

and I can’t tell if it’s the children 

trip­ping up and down the stairs 

in their Purim costumes, 

or more missiles 

scream­ing through the sky. 

The whole world wails,

every­thing but the dead,

even the land

and my heart,

(my God, how human)

while I stand here at the table, 

chop­ping veg­eta­bles and imagining 

how thin the walls must seem

from out­side those griev­ing homes today,

in Tel Aviv, Beit Shemesh, Tehran, and Minab,

from what­ev­er hori­zon the out­stretched fist fell. [2]

How deep the dread we must have felt 

when we knelt at Sinai, 

when the sho­far would not stop.

When we heard the cloud spit fire

and even the moun­tain shook. [3]

Ear­ly Break-Fast

Mon­day late after­noon, 2 March 2026 / 13 Adar 5786

A knock at the door and my heart stops,

knife sus­pend­ed midair.

Some­one will have com­plained, I suppose,

about all the noise.

But it’s just the old Arab who tends the grounds

and he holds up his hand–no, don’t wor­ry, please–

he holds out a box of hal­va cookies–

for the chil­dren, he says, for the chag. [4]

It’s the 13th day of Ramadan; it’s the fast of Esther, [5]

and the sun sits just behind the Tem­ple Mount

like rival gods, hard shim­mer answer­ing hard shimmer,

and his eyes smile when I offer a cup of coffee.

He looks over his shoul­der at the lit­tle house 

on the edge of the park­ing lot where his wife waits, pious, 

where his fam­i­ly has lived in the shade 

of a lit­tle green lemon tree for 103 years.

And the cook­ies melt, sweet as hot coals, [6]

on both our tongues. Ah-meen, he says with a sigh,

and I sur­prise myself by answering: 

Ah-meyn. [7]

Last sum­mer, [8] in the mid­dle of the day,

the kids point­ed at a falling star

and I did not cor­rect them.

I called it beautiful,

let it land softly

mag­i­cal

upon their memories.

[1] ​“Neg­a­tive Space” is an art term for the shape made by absence, the space around an object. In a Jew­ish-mys­ti­cal reg­is­ter it can also sug­gest con­ceal­ment and con­trac­tion, the way mean­ing is shaped by what is with­held as much as what is spoken.

[2] ​“Out­stretched fist” inverts a com­mon bib­li­cal idiom, ​“an out­stretched hand/​arm” (yad netuyah, zeroa netuyah), used for over­whelm­ing pow­er, deliv­er­ance, or judg­ment (espe­cial­ly in the Exo­dus lan­guage). Here the image is recast as a human-made force falling from the horizon.

[3] Echoes the Sinai theo­phany: the sho­far blast grow­ing loud­er and loud­er, and the moun­tain trem­bling (Exo­dus 19:16 – 19, 18). In the Sinai sto­ry sound and shak­ing mark a moment of over­whelm­ing rev­e­la­tion, when the peo­ple recoil because unmedi­at­ed pow­er is so terrifying.

[4] Chag (חג) is Hebrew for a fes­ti­val or holiday.

[5] The Fast of Esther (Ta’anit Esther) is observed on the day before Purim; Ramadan is the Islam­ic month of fasting.

[6] ​“Hot coals” evokes two coal-on-the-lips scenes in Jew­ish tra­di­tion: Isaiah’s purifi­ca­tion and com­mis­sion­ing when a ser­aph touch­es his lips with a live coal from the altar (Isa. 6:6 – 7), and the midrash in which the infant Moses burns his tongue on a glow­ing coal while being divert­ed from grasp­ing Pharaoh’s crown, and thus becomes ​“heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue” (Exod. 4:10; She­mot Rab­bah 1:26).

[7] Ara­bic Amin and Hebrew Amen are near-cog­nate respons­es mean­ing ​“so be it,” used after bless­ings or prayers.

[8] Dur­ing the ​“12-day war” with Iran in July 2025.