Holding Pain and Love at the Same Time
I keep coming around to what it means to hold pain and love at the same time. In August 2025, Israel’s National Security Council issued a travel warning urging Israelis to exercise increased caution in Canada because of rising antisemitism and anti-Israel hostility. Canada. My country. My home. And I love her.
I grew up believing Canada was beloved and feared in that particularly Canadian way—not because we were the biggest or loudest, but because we showed up. World wars. Peacekeeping. Earnest service. And at the same time, I grew up and learned None Is Too Many. I learned what Canada did when Jews were desperate for somewhere safe to land and the doors stayed closed. Both things are true. That is the uncomfortable part. Both things are Canada.
I know antisemitism in my own body and memory. I know the intentionally cruel names, intimidation, fear, threats of violence. But I did not grow up with the kind of vigilance I now watch my children carry as they become proudly, openly Jewish and Zionist. There is something different about watching your children figure out how loudly they can say who they are. Where they can wear something Jewish. What they should say in a classroom. Whether expressing an ordinary part of their identity could make them a target. Other children are encouraged to explore their cultures and religions openly, and I want that same freedom for mine. Period. I don't want Jewish pride to require a threat assessment.
And yet yesterday I stood on my five acres and watched the sky turn extraordinary colours. I thought about the almost ridiculous privilege of my life here: clean water, clean land, enough room to grow food, animals around me, people I know, community, safety, abundance.
Yesterday I saw a flock of Great Egrets. I had never seen that before. They were simply there, impossibly beautiful, while I was carrying all of this other stuff around in my head. Fear and beauty occupying the same landscape. Maybe that is what being Jewish in Canada is asking of me right now. Not to let fear erase beauty, and not to use beauty to deny fear. To love Canada without pretending Canada has always loved Jews back equally well. To be frightened by what I am seeing and still notice the herons.
I felt something similar recently driving through Toronto. I passed Jewish buildings with police cars outside, lights going, and my first response was the one I have had so many times: how fucking sad is this? How did we get to a place where Jewish schools and synagogues need police outside them? And then another thought arrived right beside it: there are police cars outside. There were other times in Jewish history when the threat was at the door and nobody came. When Hitler rose to power and Jews were publicly dehumanized, attacked and eventually murdered, the machinery of the state was not sitting outside Jewish institutions protecting them; it became part of their persecution. That history lives in Jewish memory whether or not we consciously summon it.
Nala Walla, recently wrote a beautiful piece called Loving America Enough to Grieve Her. She writes about America, but what stayed with me was the idea underneath it: that gratitude and grief can occupy the same space. That a country's failures do not erase everything it has given us any more than its accomplishments absolve it of what it has broken. She asks us not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but to love a country enough to grieve where it has failed and participate in its repair. I keep thinking: Canada too. I can be furious with this country and grateful for it. I can be frightened by what is happening here and still know what an extraordinary privilege it is to call this place home. Love does not require blindness. Maybe mature love requires exactly the opposite—the capacity to see the whole thing and stay.
And something else is happening in me alongside all of this. I don't want to assimilate my way back to safety. I think many Canadian Jewish families know some version of that bargain. Our families arrived carrying Europe behind them—violence, exclusion, fear, sometimes the murder of everyone who had stayed behind—and many learned that survival here meant blending in. English. Christmas concerts. Whiteness. The strange flattening language of "Judeo-Christian," which I increasingly find myself wondering: what does that even mean? We became legible to the dominant culture, and in that process some of us became less legible to ourselves. Language disappeared. Ritual became thinner. Stories went quiet. The bargain worked well enough that many of us came to experience safety as normal.
And now we are in this peculiar historical tension. Many Jews in Canada have forms of education, professional standing, political voice and institutional agency that our grandparents and great-grandparents could scarcely have imagined, while something ancient in us is still whispering: be careful, this can change. There is real danger in allowing inherited fear to become the sole narrator of the present. There is also danger in dismissing that fear simply because Jews have acquired forms of privilege. The work, psychologically and culturally, is discernment: What belongs to the past? What is actually happening now? What resources do we possess now that our ancestors did not? And what do we want to do with them?
Because I feel something waking up. Not only fear. Agency. A desire to stand up, to fight when necessary, to stop making ourselves smaller—and, strangely, at exactly the same time, a desire to go deeper into Judaism. To hear the echoes again. To recover what immigration and assimilation quieted. Not Judaism only as protection from antisemitism, but Judaism because there is something here worth knowing: ritual, community, argument, grief, joy, responsibility, memory, return. We have spent thousands of years developing ways of holding destruction and life in the same hand. Shattering and return. Exile and home. Grief and dancing. Maybe we know something about living inside contradiction.
And this is where Sea Glass keeps coming around again for me.
Sea Glass isn't really a wellness centre in my mind anymore. It is my response to fragmentation. Medicine over here. Psychology over there. Body somewhere else. Culture and spirituality politely left outside the therapist's door. Community brought in when everything else fails. Jewishness welcomed as long as it doesn't become too complicated. I don't believe people heal that way because I don't believe people exist that way. We are bodies and nervous systems and histories and families and cultures and stories and meaning and land and community, all happening at once.
So maybe Sea Glass comes from the same thing I felt looking at those herons. The willingness to hold what hurts without losing our capacity for awe. To recognize danger without making fear our identity. To take what has shattered seriously without deciding that shattered means ruined.
I don't want to throw Canada out with the bathwater. I don't want to throw Judaism away to make belonging easier either. I want my children to inherit something better than that choice.
I want to build.
And maybe that is the part of Canada I still believe in, the part of Judaism I am finding my way back to, and the part of healing I have spent my life trying to understand: we don't have to deny what is broken in order to love something.
Sometimes loving it is precisely why we insist on repair.
Comments