On October 6, 2023, I was reading “Who by Fire,” a biography of Leonard Cohen in the desert during the Yom Kippur war. The book opens with a surprise attack on a radio tower in Israel, exactly 50 years prior to my reading of this text. I was sad for the soldiers (or really kids) who woke to find their friends dead, and I gave thanks for the relative peace of that day. Who by fire is a reference to the Unetaneh Tokef prayer that we say on the high holidays, which we had just celebrated.

Then I woke On October 7, 2023, fearing that I would not get to return to Israel, so I spent the rest of October here, asking them why.