The problem with the world today is that there are so many tragedies. How do I decide which ones to honor by talking about them here, and which ones to pretend aren't happening?
The shooting in Bondi Beach is such a tragedy. And yet, overwhelmed as I have been this holiday season, not writing my usual frivolous end-of-year pieces to the same extent that I usually do, I only felt it was urgent enough to spend time on a different, movie-related tragedy, the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele.
Yet I have certainly been spending time with Bondi Beach as well. I keep thinking about the chilling effect this has had on Hanukkah celebrations throughout the world -- obviously here in Australia, and especially in Sydney, our sister city. But everywhere. Everyone knows that hate can pop up at any moment, and hate is disproportionately being directed at Jews right now. In saying that, though, I should note that Muslims are equally at risk, as noted in the terrible mosque shooting in Christchurch a couple years ago.
And yet this is also a time of joy and melancholy in my family.
My younger son is leaving his primary school days behind him. In Australia, kids transition to high school when they enter year 7, which my son will be doing at the end of January. So this ends our four years of affiliation with the school that's just around the corner from my house, where we moved at the end of 2021. My older son spent one year there and the younger has now spent more years there than he did at his original primary school.
There was a graduation ceremony on Monday night, which made me sentimental as hell. My son gave a speech, as did all his classmates in the staggered ceremony, which featured the three homeroom classes graduating in consecutive hour-long time slots. They finished with a dance, which was sort of in the style of that viral wedding dance that they then also performed on The Office, designed to trigger all of our brimming emotions.
During what is also the Christmas season -- a very strange Christmas season in our household indeed -- my emotions are brimming for all sorts of different reasons. People dying. People with health issues. People moving on to the next phase of their childhoods, reminding me of how I myself am aging, and how my youngest son will never be quite so young again.
I feel a bit like I'm in a movie. Movies are good at capturing this tug-of-war between joy and grief in our lives. We know it isn't all just miserable, but we also know you can never have complete joy without it being tempered by pain. And then in among it all there are things like Christmas, arriving in eight days whether we want it to or not, creating certain obligations that must be ticked off, certain expected joys, and certain pain of remembering those we used to share the holiday with who are no longer with us.
And for the Jewish friends among us, the "obligation" of Hanukkah can hardly be expected to carry as many of the offsetting joys this year as it has in the past.
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