PREPENT Day 25 // Tom Lev: Yikes
A reflection on "Tom Lev: Yikes (as is)" by Tom Haviv
I often think of the following very short story by Franz Kafka, The Next Village:
My grandfather used to say: "Life is astoundingly short. To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that -- not to mention accidents -- even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey."
Returning to the story this year, I am reminded of the simplicity of the sentiment of despair. How despair does not need an elaborate apparatus to come to life and blanket our sense of the possibility. It does not need warplanes, bombs, weapons, soldiers, political strife, the endless stream of death and grief that we have grown accustomed to viewing from afar—living somewhere between dissociation and that “oceanic feeling” that Freud once wrote about.
What has happened in Gaza and in Israel/Palestine and the wider region—and in the innumerable human catastrophes around the world that I will not uselessly list here—ultimately lies beyond words. Words matter—and yet ultimately I feel that the depth of the catastrophes are unnameable. For this reason, I have often been stunned into silence—which I regret—by watching unfold what many of us have been screaming against for decades, to little to no success—and to little understanding and compassion from those closest to us—both in the cultural and familial sense.
So it’s exactly this feeling of everyday impossibility in Kafka’s story that strikes me most: that the simplest act of traveling from one village over to the next can seem most daunting. That the thing closest to us, can seem like the farthest gulf. This is what always moved me about this piece—this strange Koan by the most famous Jewish writer, perhaps after Judaism. He says, further, that the intervening of mere events of a “normal happy life,” including banal unnamed “accidents,” can prevent such a simple journey. That any “normal happy life” may be too limited in vision to undertake such a simple task—that happiness and comfort, and the luck of avoiding a tragic early death—in war, or by disease, or by other human meanness—does not ensure that any greatness or courage or vision is imparted to the person living it.
Many of us have lived normal happy lives. We can modify normal. But we certainly have longer lives than many on earth—especially those in the war zones we have become so intimately implicated in.
I have lived in NYC most of my life, and only now seem to be starting to leave for good.
Many generations have thought the same thoughts about Israel and Palestine, and only now, with so much loss, many seem to be shifting their thinking.
What things closest to us have we assumed are impossible to overcome? As I weigh the guilt of how little I feel I can change in the conflicts across the ocean—at the end of the world—I am struck by how many impossibilities I accept, by slippery consensus, by pragmatic dissociation, by the violence of turning away, to operate and function in my “normal life.” The unhoused person, the incessant whisper of hatred, the threats of ignorance. That simple, easy act of accepting these mundane details of evil & neglect, to pursue the “normal life.”
At the end of the Jewish year, I wonder what we accept in our daily lives (that which is so close to us that we see it best, and ignore it most easily) that has allowed for the cataclysms in the world that are being done in all of our names, and against the true possibility of humanity, to transpire.
Tom Haviv (he/him) is a writer, artist, educator & publisher based in New York.
He has taught at CUNY/Brooklyn College. He received his BA from Pomona College and an MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College.
He is the co-founder of Ayin Press, Somewhere, and Aora Studio
His debut book of poetry, A Flag of No Nation, was published in 2019 by Jewish Currents Press, and his first children’s book, Woven, was published by Ayin Press in 2018.
Welcome to PREPENT 2024/5785: A-Z Daily Reflections on Public Accountability into a Better New Jewish Year
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