“My Furrowed Brow” — A poem about the Israeli conflict
Recorded 3/18/26 at Gypsy Coffee in Tulsa, Oklahoma
“My Furrowed Brow” is my response to the Hamas – Israeli conflict set off by the October 7, 2024, attacks. I hope it helps you see that people on both sides of the conflict are just that: people, with complicated histories and bottomless faith. Enjoy!
“My Furrowed Brow”
I
When I think of the Jewish homeland these days,
counting down the anniversary of this most recent war,
my only certainty
is this furrowed brow
at the playground machinations of warring men.
“If he does this, then I’ll do this, but they are my friends, so my enemy must be the one hanging
upside down
exposing his soft underbelly,
guts spilling out”
while I keep my mouth shut,
frown lines of concern
parallel, never touching: the life I lead safely in America,
a passing goy;
and the Israeli one I passed on,
the one the West Bank checkpoint soldiers left alone
on a bus bound for Tel Aviv.
2018.
While they inspect passengers’ papers,
their shoulder-slung guns
scrape the threadbare, scratchy, empty seats.
Blue wool moquette, tea-green fatigues,
ink-dipped desert night through glass—
I look away;
they pass me over,
and the question of apartheid threads my brows together.
II
I call my Sumerian auntie before shabbos, her news eight hours ahead,
because I miss the smell of her sweat in a hug I haven’t had since December;
and the December before, when she flew in for my mother’s cancer treatments.
She tells me she’s cooked three meals ahead of time for the day of “rest,”
updates me on the cousins and their litters:
“This one moved into a bigger house with their five (they’re trying for more).”
“That one ‘bought’ their newborn son from a cohen in an ancient redemptive rite.”
She jokes that “left-wing nutjobs” have taken over her grandson’s army unit, that he’s relieved to be back in yeshiva, back with his wife, not questioning law or Bibi or war crimes.
They are 21, and my boyfriend of a year and I are childless, nearing geriatric status if we even wanted to try.
She is a great-grandmother at 76.
She went forth to the land and multiplied, vowed to repopulate the Jewish world.
My brow contracts
in time
a cervix ripening.
The forbidden fruit was a fig
or maybe an apple
a pomegranate—on Ha-Rimon Street,
the cars sit silently on Friday nights,
and I wonder when Israel’s crash is coming, or if they are insulated: laws upheld, traditions frozen, then passed down, like fear, like headlight deer.
My hands start buzzing.
My auntie frets about the holiday coming up—
her freezers (plural) are over-full.
It would be funny or a little sick if not for the Great Depression, the Russian pogroms, the cycle of colonizers experiencing eminent domain—
her husband, my uncle, was raised in a refugee camp
in Germany
two years after “the war.”
Now he carries a gun
and beats grooves into the wadi
that surrounds their settlement:
guarding the edge of desert-yellow irrigated sand.
III
I know well Israel’s propaganda machine
like you would if you were born out of death
and a socialist ideal. You wish you had a community like this,
the ads say, and the insulation from hate helps you feel normal.
“They’re just getting what’s theirs,” they reason, but they won’t say who—or what or why.
All on a cycle,
beepers going off like
suicide bombs
on a bus
in the market
they/we are all
martyrs—
blood soaked in the sand.
I am a Jew—did you feel the frisson of fear when I said that phrase out loud?
Before light, I chose my birth into this specific life—or G/d did—and I choose it every day.
Am I a true zionist if I never made aliyah? Safe here in the “land of the free”—
wondering if, in the 1920s, when the U.K. took pity on the wretched Jews,
those goblin-fingered money counters,
by gifting them a spit of land their collective memory cultivated into this,
a mitzvah, a benedicion,
a hundred years later, “They should’ve just made non-Jews citizens,” despite evolving cultural context and the evolution of “just.”
This generation thinks it’s civility’s pinnacle, a societal apex, that it can unfurl this knitted brow
can stop projectiles mid-arc: of long-range missiles to Ukraine,
from inside Lebanon,
sponsored by Iran, the U.S., and the watermelon emoji; the dybbuk Russian oligarchy:
all these mouthpieces, free, and now mine, possessed.
IV
The range of human emotions is too small for things like war
when a buzzing fly, a sweat-salted squinting brow and
sand in gritted teeth,
fear hard-baked under the Sun
can set us into the same kind of murderous rage.
40,000 dead—
you couldn’t even count that high if you tried—
the same number of termites an anteater kills in a day
with one significant difference.
This is Jewish guilt like Irish guilt like Catholic guilt like Greek curly-haired mother-with-a-wooden-spoon guilt like the daughter of a narcissist guilt like the granddaughter of a lottery winner guilt like she came over on a boat alone because the rest of Hungary died,
and she got the winning ticket: a Brooklyn foster home-sweatshop and marriage to a New Jersey Jew—that type of guilt.
The kind that’s cyclical, spiritual, and seeps into your bones: a grizzly chill from a sweat-stained nightmare
and a timer that
keeps going off.
Everyone, my Friday night chicken is ready, so let’s eat and pray for magnificence—
the glory of G/d and his prophet Elijah
(the angel of death)
passing lambs’ blood on the door.
V
In America
under peacetime,
we’re hostages
of zionism—
this mangled brow—
I just want to hug my mother,
who told me never to say out loud that I’m a Jew.
You don’t have control
over what your government does. Over what people say in close quarters.
Over your life. And yet, are you free?
VI
Are you working daily towards the collective’s liberation?
Are you embodying tikkun olam, the piecing together of a fragmented world
comprised of broken glass—
Kristallnacht, Germany 1938, Berlin:
The fallacy to fix the thing that’s broken—
Well, after you broke it—
rather than creating something new
in His image.
What are you making?
I don’t know anymore—
my eyebrows are skelly with the stress.
VII
The good book says, “Next year in Jerusalem.”
I bow my head in reverence to the words
where no one can see my furrowed brow.
Glossary of terms:
Goy: non-Jewish person
Shabbos: weekly day of rest (Sabbath)
Cohen: In the Jewish Bible, a priestly class of Jews
Yeshiva: A religious school where (usually) young men go to study Jewish tradition
Pogroms: Violent government-sanctioned raids on Jewish towns in Russia and Eastern Europe aimed at expelling Jewish communities, 1800s
Wadi: (in certain Arabic-speaking countries) a valley, ravine, or channel that is dry except in the rainy season
Aliyah: Literally, “to ascend,” but culturally, this refers to a Jew immigrating to Israel
Dybbuk: In Eastern European Jewish lore, a malevolent wandering spirit that enters and possesses the body of a living person until exorcized
Tikkun olam: The Reform Jewish idea that Jews are put on Earth to put the world back together, to do good in this lifeKristallnacht: “the night of broken glass,” a destructive riot in WWII Germany that saw Jewish businesses and homes destroyed
For more of my musings on Israeli life and my trips to the Middle East, check out my Israel blog!
A portrait of a Spanish Jewish woman removing her hair wrap — captured at the Haifa City Museum in 2018.
