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In these last months of 2023, I have noticed the Jewish ancestors in me more than ever

This story originally appeared on My Jewish Learning.
(JTA) — “Be careful,” my mother would laugh if I teased her. “I might come back and haunt you.”
This week marks 10 years since my mother’s death and the haunting is sweet. I often feel her close, especially at this time of year, in the passage of short days and long nights, in the unavoidable outbreath of Christmas and the crisp anticipation of a new year.
My mother’s death also reverberates in this week’s Torah portion, in which we find Joseph and his brothers gathered at the bed of their father Jacob, our complicated patriarch, to witness him breathe his last.
The scene is an especially tender one. After offering his sons rather mixed blessings, prophesying the troubles and troubling traits of their descendants, the text says this: “Jacob gathered his feet into the bed; he expired and was gathered to his people.” (Genesis 49:33)
This language catches me every time — the repetition of “gathering,” the sons, the feet and the life. In this verse is a suggestion that for the lucky among us, dying might be as easeful as drawing our feet into bed. And that beyond the doorway there is a hint of reunion with our people. This grace is offered to some but not all of our forebears. Abraham is similarly gathered to his people, as are Isaac and Ishmael. Sarah and Joseph, in contrast, simply “die.” Rachel’s death in childbirth is a painful tear-jerker. And the deaths of Rebecca and Leah are simply not recorded.
As I reread Jacob’s deathbed scene, I feel a special empathy for Joseph, both of us having spent decades far from a beloved parent only to have them unexpectedly near at the close of the story. In Joseph’s case, Jacob is at last close by in Goshen, the Egyptian outskirts. In my case, my mother was visiting me in California for her 85th birthday when she had a stroke. She endured for five weeks, enough time to have, like Jacob, countless bedside gatherings before she too was gathered.
What is this gathering? And to whom exactly are we gathered? The Torah uses the word am, meaning “people” or “nation,” rather than avot, meaning “ancestors.” Just a few verses earlier (Genesis 49:29), Jacob uses both, saying, “I am being gathered to my people (ami); bury me with my ancestors (avotai),” suggesting that those words do not mean the same thing. Maybe ancestors are individuals, bound by their biographies; they are the past. The people, the am, might be something larger and more collective — the unfolding of our shared story over time; they are the future.
In this sense, Jacob might be buried with Abraham and Sarah, but it is to us that he is gathered. We are the am, still in forward motion. We continue his story. We even go by his symbolic God-wrestling name, Yisrael. Jacob has been gathered into us — his ambitions, his destiny, his fears, his grief, his limitations.
I can say with certainty that my mother has been gathered into me. Sometimes I hear my own laugh and think she is doing the laughing. Or I scrunch my face just so and, without looking in a mirror, I know the expression to be hers. In a moment of insecurity or aggravation I can feel her insecurity and aggravation rise in my gut. Yet even as I notice these things, I know my mother did not invent them. Her laugh, her expressions, her insecurities — those were in turn gathered into her by generations previous.
We carry the ancestors in us. We carry them in a vast mosaic of talents and traits and traumas. From our mothers’ delights and fears all the way back to Jacob dreaming of a ladder, wrestling angels, snookering his brother and getting snookered in return, losing a favorite child and regaining him against all odds. And in between Jacob and us? Countless generations of seeking and suffering.
In these last months, I have noticed the ancestors in me more than ever. I have felt a rising fear and quick reactivity honed over centuries of brutal European persecution. I have felt it in me and I have seen it in others. These ancestors, survivors of massacres and pogroms and the Holocaust and who knows what else, are gathered into me. Their fears and their survival tactics are in my cells and they are all reignited.
I breathe in their experience. I honor the reflexes their legacy gives me. But I am not bound to act from the place of their trauma. I get to choose. One day I will be gathered to my people, and I am answerable for the legacy I leave. What hope or despair, skill or brutishness, openness of heart or resilience of spirit, will be gathered from me into those who come after?
Let us give them the best we have. We have it in us to replace ancestral trauma with ancestral hope and wholeness. Let us do this as a healing, a tikkun, on their behalf. So that after we have drawn our own feet into the bed, we might make all the generations, past and future, proud.
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The post In these last months of 2023, I have noticed the Jewish ancestors in me more than ever appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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After False Dawns, Gazans Hope Trump Will Force End to Two-Year-Old War

Palestinians walk past a residential building destroyed in previous Israeli strikes, after Hamas agreed to release hostages and accept some other terms in a US plan to end the war, in Nuseirat, central Gaza Strip October 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa
Exhausted Palestinians in Gaza clung to hopes on Saturday that US President Donald Trump would keep up pressure on Israel to end a two-year-old war that has killed tens of thousands and displaced the entire population of more than two million.
Hamas’ declaration that it was ready to hand over hostages and accept some terms of Trump’s plan to end the conflict while calling for more talks on several key issues was greeted with relief in the enclave, where most homes are now in ruins.
“It’s happy news, it saves those who are still alive,” said 32-year-old Saoud Qarneyta, reacting to Hamas’ response and Trump’s intervention. “This is enough. Houses have been damaged, everything has been damaged, what is left? Nothing.”
GAZAN RESIDENT HOPES ‘WE WILL BE DONE WITH WARS’
Ismail Zayda, 40, a father of three, displaced from a suburb in northern Gaza City where Israel launched a full-scale ground operation last month, said: “We want President Trump to keep pushing for an end to the war, if this chance is lost, it means that Gaza City will be destroyed by Israel and we might not survive.
“Enough, two years of bombardment, death and starvation. Enough,” he told Reuters on a social media chat.
“God willing this will be the last war. We will hopefully be done with the wars,” said 59-year-old Ali Ahmad, speaking in one of the tented camps where most Palestinians now live.
“We urge all sides not to backtrack. Every day of delay costs lives in Gaza, it is not just time wasted, lives get wasted too,” said Tamer Al-Burai, a Gaza City businessman displaced with members of his family in central Gaza Strip.
After two previous ceasefires — one near the start of the war and another earlier this year — lasted only a few weeks, he said; “I am very optimistic this time, maybe Trump’s seeking to be remembered as a man of peace, will bring us real peace this time.”
RESIDENT WORRIES THAT NETANYAHU WILL ‘SABOTAGE’ DEAL
Some voiced hopes of returning to their homes, but the Israeli military issued a fresh warning to Gazans on Saturday to stay out of Gaza City, describing it as a “dangerous combat zone.”
Gazans have faced previous false dawns during the past two years, when Trump and others declared at several points during on-off negotiations between Hamas, Israel and Arab and US mediators that a deal was close, only for war to rage on.
“Will it happen? Can we trust Trump? Maybe we trust Trump, but will Netanyahu abide this time? He has always sabotaged everything and continued the war. I hope he ends it now,” said Aya, 31, who was displaced with her family to Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.
She added: “Maybe there is a chance the war ends at October 7, two years after it began.”
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Mass Rally in Rome on Fourth Day of Italy’s Pro-Palestinian Protests

A Pro-Palestinian demonstrator waves a Palestinian flag during a national protest for Gaza in Rome, Italy, October 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Claudia Greco
Large crowds assembled in central Rome on Saturday for the fourth straight day of protests in Italy since Israel intercepted an international flotilla trying to deliver aid to Gaza, and detained its activists.
People holding banners and Palestinian flags, chanting “Free Palestine” and other slogans, filed past the Colosseum, taking part in a march that organizers hoped would attract at least 1 million people.
“I’m here with a lot of other friends because I think it is important for us all to mobilize individually,” Francesco Galtieri, a 65-year-old musician from Rome, said. “If we don’t all mobilize, then nothing will change.”
Since Israel started blocking the flotilla late on Wednesday, protests have sprung up across Europe and in other parts of the world, but in Italy they have been a daily occurrence, in multiple cities.
On Friday, unions called a general strike in support of the flotilla, with demonstrations across the country that attracted more than 2 million, according to organizers. The interior ministry estimated attendance at around 400,000.
Italy’s right-wing government has been critical of the protests, with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni suggesting that people would skip work for Gaza just as an excuse for a longer weekend break.
On Saturday, Meloni blamed protesters for insulting graffiti that appeared on a statue of the late Pope John Paul II outside Rome’s main train station, where Pro-Palestinian groups have been holding a protest picket.
“They say they are taking to the streets for peace, but then they insult the memory of a man who was a true defender and builder of peace. A shameful act committed by people blinded by ideology,” she said in a statement.
Israel launched its Gaza offensive after Hamas terrorists staged a cross border attack on October 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 people hostage.
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Hamas Says It Agrees to Release All Israeli Hostages Under Trump Gaza Plan

Smoke rises during an Israeli military operation in Gaza City, as seen from the central Gaza Strip, October 2, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas
Hamas said on Friday it had agreed to release all Israeli hostages, alive or dead, under the terms of US President Donald Trump’s Gaza proposal, and signaled readiness to immediately enter mediated negotiations to discuss the details.