The Jewish High Holy Days this year have also been a time of reflection and mourning a year after the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas.
Local playwright Sandy Laub, who wrote a one-person play after the tragedy called “Picking Up Stones: An American Jew Wakes to a Nightmare,” sat down with South County Bureau Reporter Alex Nunes to share her thoughts a year later.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Alex Nunes: How did you spend Rosh Hashanah?
Sandy Laub: We had a family meal, and that was great. And typically you have apples and honey, and it’s a sweet New Year. But this year, of course, we talked around the table about how it was bittersweet, and we wished for a better year next year — a better year for all Jews, in Israel, certainly a better year. And then it’s followed by the most solemn holiday in the Jewish calendar, which is Yom Kippur. And then the holiday after that is Simchat Torah, which is the holiday when Hamas came across the border and attacked these two dozen kibbutz on the border, on the line.
Nunes: The conversations that you had during Rosh Hashanah, what were those like?
Laub: I was just grateful to be there, being able to celebrate with everyone, and feeling, of course, as we entered into this week of memorial for October 7th, feeling just so blessed and grateful that I do not have to worry about heading to a bomb shelter in the middle of what my cousins are going through right now in Israel.
Nunes: Are you in contact with your cousins in Israel?
Laub: Yeah, we’re all on WhatsApp. These are, you know, my grandmother’s sister … My grandmother came to the States in the early 1900s. Her sister went to Israel. The rest of our family in that part of Eastern Europe was killed in the Holocaust. So it’s my grandmother’s side of the family who are in Israel now. It’s a tense, difficult time. It’s a tense, difficult, sad time for Jews. I’ve heard from a friend, a high school buddy, he made Aliyah, which is his return home to Israel, 40 years ago, and he told me he was outside with his grandchildren at a playground, and the sirens go off and everybody in the playground grab their kids and seek shelter in the apartment buildings that are right next door. It’s a “desperate, absurd situation,” is what he said. His word was “absurd.”
Nunes: Yom Kippur being the most solemn holiday, and following October 7th, what are you thinking, feeling about that?
Laub: I think it’s going to be a very reflective time, a time of prayer. We’re all trying to support each other, and we’re all not quite sure how to do it.
Nunes: Why do you think you’re not sure how?
Laub: I don’t want to have an argument with an Israeli friend, for example, who does not want to say the word Palestinian. And she’s scared, and her son was sent to Gaza, so I don’t wish to argue with her. I wish to listen to her, but this is part of the way that Israel itself is split. So I don’t know how to help, how to support. I feel very critical about the way that Prime Minister Netanyahu is prosecuting this war. I disagree vehemently with ministers who are coming at the war from a kind of non-humanitarian way. You cannot do that. You cannot dehumanize people. We’re all lost if we do that.
Nunes: I want to talk about the play now, your play. Can you tell me the title, the general plot, what the play is about?
Laub: My play is titled, “Picking Up Stones: An American Jew Wakes to a Nightmare,” and I began it on October 8th, 2023. It’s me, and it’s my story, and it’s my Jewish upbringing, and it’s my reconciling my Jewish values with what’s happening in the war. And I get there through remembering stories from my life and then recapturing how I found out about what was going on on October 7th, and how I related that to my visit to Israel in 2014. It’s a solo show. It’s 95 minutes long. There are about 21 characters that I play. I have a college student, a young Jewish woman who I met before October 7th, and at that time on her college campus, she called it “so anti-Israel it is anti-semitic.” And on the other hand, I met this one young woman in a hijab who said, “My campus is Islamophobic.” So my play is an attempt to heal by listening and to feel empathy. Because if you can’t feel empathy for another human being, who are we? You know, pikuach nefesh is Hebrew for “to save a life overrides everything” – any life, Jewish or non-Jewish. And I’ve played it now seven times. We did it first, this version, at a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Peacedale. And I just did it at another Unitarian Universalist congregation in Newport, Rhode Island. And I would love to do it for Jewish audiences. However, I think it is really difficult for a Jewish audience to listen with a whole heart to any other voice than the voice that says, “They’re doing it again. They’re killing Jews. We have to stick together.”
Nunes: What do you want people to take away from it in terms of their understanding about how you feel about all of this?
Laub: I think that they will watch someone who is grappling with the paradoxes, the complexities, the yearning for peace, the yearning for reconciliation. And I think that anyone watching a theatrical performance is going to find some catharsis themselves with their own stories.
Nunes: You mentioned when we spoke earlier that you’re considering making a trip to Israel.
Laub: Yes, there are arrangements that have come into place, and support that could take me to Israel with this play. We would love to do it for an audience that both understands this multifaceted world of the play. I would love to do it for people like my friend who can’t even say the word Palestinian, because I think Israel must heal from its trauma of this past year, but also from years and years of living with their own kind of PTSD.
