I know the spooky season is technically over, but I got distracted by The Great Reorganisation of 2024, and I’ve been trying to write this post for a while now.
Ghosts are the past, coming to haunt us. That’s how they’ve been portrayed in popular media, from Rebecca to The Woman in Black and everything these classics have inspired. But there are also benevolent ghosts, usually our ancestors, watching over us, from Mulan to Coco. Interestingly, Western stories tend to feature more malicious ghosts, having evolved from the Gothic tradition.
I find it interesting that ghosts in the Western Gothic tradition also tend to haunt places, mostly houses. It is almost a cliche that ghosts symbolise the past, and houses symbolise people. And in thinking about this subtle difference between ghosts and ancestors, I found this in a conversation between Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen:
“The trick is you have to turn your ghosts into ancestors. Ghosts haunt you. Ancestors walk alongside you and provide you with comfort and a vision of life that’s going to be your own.” –Bruce Springsteen.
Besides being an interesting conversation, it made me think about the process I’ve been through in the last few years. I, too, have been turning my ghosts into ancestors. It requires a lot of therapy and introspection. It brings up a lot of grief.
I grew up in an Israel that was surrounded by enemies. But it was also an Israel where everyone cared for each other. There was a camaraderie that came from joint struggles for survival. There was a belief that the authorities served the citizens’ greater good. You had to make sacrifices. For example, I had to serve in the army (mandatory service), but the idea was that I was protecting my fellow citizens and loved ones. The feeling was that alone, we are vulnerable, but together we are strong.
Well, in the past year, I’ve been grieving this place. I don’t know if it ever existed except in the heads of idealists like my parents and the people I grew up with. In the past few years, I’ve learned about how Israel grabbed land even before 1967. I think it has been much, much worse in the past thirty years or so. But as Gandhi said, the end is the means just as the tree is in the seed. The violence by which we have gained our independence is evident today in the senseless expansion hallucinations the current government purports.
But I also know that ghosts are not necessarily tied to a specific place. I haven’t lived in Israel in over twenty years. I carry those ghosts with me. And it doesn’t mean I can’t deal with them, come to terms with them, turn them into ancestors. As Springsteen notes, ancestors walk with you. I wrote about some of it in my short story Pomegranate. I wrote it as a ghost story, but it’s not your traditional one.
Maybe we could have dealt with the trauma of the Holocaust (and the preceding generations of antisemitism) and created a just society, but we haven’t yet. I hope that someday, we can turn our ghosts into ancestors.
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