Terror, joy, and fireflies - The Jewish Standard

These last few years have been, objectively speaking, weird, as we have come to accept more and more deviations from what had been the norm. Vulgarity, crudeness, and callousness on one side and excessive sensitivity to perceived but unintended slights on the other have combined to leave many of us perpetually off-balance, constantly uneasy, permanently on guard.

The last few months have seen all of that intensity; the last week’s crescendo of grotesque awful has reached what we can only hope but have no reason to assume is its crest.

People’s emotions run high, and with reason. We’ve been provoked.

October 7 was an act of atavistic, barbaric evil, and the antisemitism and anti-Zionism that it has pulled up from the sewers is horrifying.

Terror stalks much of the world. Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, shaking up the world as it has been since the end of World War II, evoking fears that we haven’t faced, as a nation, for more than half a century.

And now the presidential election is dividing Americans as we haven’t been divided since the Civil War. Anger seethes, and disbelief at the idiocy of the other side swells. And please note that I am not noting this from some disembodied high place. I feel it too. How can those people on the other side possibly believe what they believe? What’s wrong with them?

And now, since we have seen Joe Biden’s struggles with form and Donald Trump’s struggles with content as they both try to speak — and now, since the Supreme Court has made its shocking, predictably late but unpredictably revolutionary decision on immunity, as Aileen Cannon made her predictably late but until-recently-unpredictably revolutionary decision on the constitutionality of special prosecutors, and most recently, and most shockingly, the attempt on Trump’s life that left him with blood on his ear and his fist thrust triumphantly skyward — the intensity has grown almost unbearably.

We work hard to keep those feelings out of the paper, except for the opinion pages. Trump haters hate our pro-Trump writers; Trump-haters will not easily stomach this week’s pro-Trump essay.

But we’re all human, here at the paper, and all citizens and registered voters, even if we work scrupulously to keep our feelings and affiliations as undercover as possible while we work.

It’s really hard to do. It’s hard to remain balanced when the world seems to be tipping.

I have found a temporary if ridiculous-sounding antidote to fear and rage.

Fireflies.

This is firefly season. If you brave the heat and humidity that make you feel covered with greasy dirt as soon as you go outside, if you walk in a garden or a park at around dusk, you are likely to see ugly, buzzy insects all of a sudden go magic. When fireflies aren’t lit up (I know there’s a more scientific term for that, but I don’t know it) they are hideous. When they light up, they’re beautiful. They’re flashes of colored light that dart and dance and keep you standing open mouthed, staring, until your dog makes clear that it’s time to go home, where the water bowl awaits.

It’s a far smaller, more do-it-yourself version of what our columnist Jeremy Fingerman, the CEO of the Foundation for Jewish Camp, recommends. He says go to camp, I say just find a firefly, but in the end we’re both saying the same thing. Find joy.

Even in this world, joy exists, and we are better off for it. We shouldn’t — and we couldn’t, and we can’t — forget about the very real problems and terrors and evils afoot in the world, but we also have to remember that whenever we stumble across joy, we should glory in it. It will strengthen us for everything else.

—JP

Opinion

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