Now I am 42

A philatelic nod to 42

In 2002, I was 42.

I liked the number for a silly reason. It was the famous answer from the books, and I was old enough to enjoy that joke and young enough to repeat it too often. Israel was a harder place then in the way bad weather is hard. You did not like it, but you knew when to take a coat. You watched the news, checked the streets, opened your parcels at the entrance to anywhere, and still went to work, bought groceries, argued about politics, and called it life. This was a few years before the hail of rockets from Gaza.

Back then, fear had borders. It had a bus stop, a market, a cafe, a road junction. It was terrible, but it was concrete. A Jew in Israel knew that he lived with danger, yet he also knew where home was. Home was the place where no one had to explain why the holidays mattered, why history sat at the table with the soup, why one old photograph could silence a room.

I am almost 66 now. Or 42 in hexa, which is the sort of joke that proves I have not changed as much as I pretend.

The world has changed more than I have, or has it?

In 2002, when someone disliked Jews, he usually used old words. They were ugly words, but familiar. They came from the usual cupboards of history. You could point to them and say: there, that is antisemitism. It wore a face that people were still ashamed to show in daylight.

Now it often comes dressed more neatly. It arrives polished, educated, global. It speaks the language of justice while making old accusations sound new. It says "Zionist" and waits to see if anyone objects when it really means "Jew." It claims not to hate Jews while demanding that the only Jewish state behave in a way no other state is ever asked to behave. It tells me that I am imagining things, that I am too sensitive, that this time the hatred is principled.

That may be the strangest change of all. The danger no longer always feels local, or even physical, though of course it can become physical soon enough. It feels moral. It feels like standing in a room where people have decided, very calmly, that Jewish fear does not count as fear, Jewish grief does not count as grief, and Jewish self-defense is the one sin that cannot be forgiven.

In 2002, I worried about whether it was safe to stand in the wrong place.

Now I also worry about whether my child, my people, and my country are allowed to stand anywhere at all.

And yet some things have not changed.

I am still a Jew. I am still an Israeli. I still know that memory is a form of self-defense. I still know that survival is not only breathing, but insisting on living as myself, openly, stubbornly, with humor intact. I still know that our enemies always believe they are modern, while their hatred is ancient.

So yes, the world has changed. It has become faster, louder, and in many ways less honest. And yes, I think it has become less safe for Jews, because hatred now travels farther, hides better, and finds excuses more easily. Violence against Jews is brushed away. "Didn't happen," they say, or ignore it. "Fake news," they say, but it isn't!

But I have changed too.

At 42, I thought resilience meant getting through the day.

At 66, I know it also means refusing to let the world explain me out of my own story.

As a collector, I could not resist ending with a small philatelic wink: a 42-cent stamp for the number that once felt like a joke, and now feels like a marker on the road.