A Jew’s Unexpected Journey Into the Gun Shop

Like so many Jews since October 7th, I am not okay. I smile. I laugh. I work. I write. But I’m faking it. Underneath all of it, I am anxious, scared, heartbroken for the hostages and their families.

photo: Jay Rembert/Unsplash

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This is an essay written by Jeremy Garelick from Zibby Owens’ book, “On Being Jewish Now.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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I walked into AJ’s gun shop.

I turned to my wife, Sam, with a weird smile on my face. She looked back at me, like, “What the hell are we doing here?”

We’re New York Jews in a gun shop. What do we know about guns? We know about bagels, about Roth IRAs, about Hamantaschen … but guns?

“What kinda gun are you looking for?” asked Adam, the owner. No clue. “You want something for bears? For deer? Target practice?” We didn’t know how to answer.

“We’re Jewish,” Sam said.

Adam stared at us for a moment, sizing us up, an uneasy tension in the air. Then, spoken with clear confidence, he said, “You’re gonna want a nine-millimeter Beretta and pump-action shotgun.”

I never thought I’d be a gun owner, but I also never thought I’d be woken up by my wife on the morning of October 7th, with her saying: “Israel was attacked. It’s bad.”

Last June, my family moved from Los Angeles, where I could trip and fall into a minyan, to a small town in Upstate New York, where I am the call for the tenth man when a minyan is needed. There are no kosher restaurants and the Jewish community is made up mostly of my wife’s family. The responsibility of being Jewish is more challenging here because we have to represent all the Jewish people to everyone.

My oldest son is one of the only Jewish students in his public school. (In fact, he’s attending Christian Brothers next year, where there are actually more Jews.) I was nervous about how he’d respond going into class on Monday, October 9th. After all, he was a freshman in a new public high school on the other side of the country. I had channeled my own mom with a pep talk that I was ready to give about how he should be a strong, proud Jew and a strong, proud Zionist (by the way, his name is Zion). He came down from his room in a Krav Maga T-shirt with Hebrew letters. The tears ran down my face. I didn’t have to give him a speech. It was already in him.

For better or worse, it was already in all of us: our Jewish pride, our love of Israel, our generational trauma, our anxiety, our need to make sure that our grandmothers would be proud of how we acted at all times, and our lack of ability to be okay when other Jews are not okay. Like so many Jews since October 7th, I am not okay. I smile. I laugh. I work. I write. But I’m faking it. Underneath all of it, I am anxious, scared, heartbroken for the hostages and their families. I feel horribly guilty that I am in a position of influence, yet can’t do anything to bring them home.

On top of that horrible feeling of inadequacy and guilt, I feel an insane burden to defend the actions of Israel to every- one around me, which makes me feel like I’m going crazy.

How can so many people justify the actions of Hamas? What is everyone seeing that I can’t see? What the hell is wrong with me? Was everything I was taught wrong? Was everything I saw with my own eyes wrong?

Since October 7th, I have witnessed inexplicable antisemitism. The kind I’ve always studied that I never understood. The kind that made Pharoah, Haman, Hitler, and so many others attempt to destroy us. The kind that was, well, inexplicable.

I open up Instagram and see images of Jews stabbed, shuls burned, kosher restaurants vandalized, schools being shot at—and I see the people I work with and call “friends” remaining silent. I look at silence as a positive. Why? So many others in my sphere are actively promoting antisemitism. Staying silent about it has become a welcomed trait. I’ve actively thanked my Middle Eastern coworkers for not sharing death-to-Jews-like posts.

My Hebrew name is Shalom, which means peace. I’ve been all about conflict resolution for my entire life, but being Jew- ish now means that I have to be vigilant and strong. I have to be prepared for the fact that people I’ve loved, helped, and trusted might inexplicably dislike my family and me just because we’re Jewish.

I now understand how society let my Bubby’s parents get murdered in front of her eyes, her father’s beard ripped from his face. Like it or not, I’m Jewish. And somehow, Sam’s simple response to Adam’s question about what kind of gun we were looking for made so much more sense.

Like my Bubby and Queen Esther and Moses and Joshua and countless others before me, people will inexplicably hate me for being Jewish. And like Pharoah, Hitler, and

Haman, those who try to destroy us won’t succeed, and our great-great-grandchildren will have a holiday about it, where they will eat and dance and close the night by singing, “Next year in Jerusalem!”

Let it be so.

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