I was sitting in a Quaker Meeting when I lost it. It was as if God had sent an angel to tell me that everything I'd tried to hold onto for so long was lost, was not worth the agony of fighting for, that contrary to popular belief, blood means nothing to the shaping of faith.

But I waver back and forth because my blood says that I am a Jew and blood doesn't lie. Blood is your nature and although I may rebel against my own and try to claw myself out of my own skin, my blood has shaped my soul. Despite how much and how far and how fast I run, my skin runs with me. And when I leave this earth, my soul will run with me, too.

The screams of history are what beseech me, and they are the screams of Past, Present, and Future. I cannot escape that wind.

A woman stood up in the Meeting and pierced me all the way through, back to my ancestors, and forward, to my descendants. She reminded me that it was the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the second day of the New Year. I heard no Shofar blow, no Torah read. I cried silently in the midst of the silence. My best friend held my hand and I hid my tears but he sensed them anyway.

It doesn't matter what I believe, or what I have faith in, or what I don't. It matters what others believe: that I have horns, that I worship the devil, that I kill Christian children and drink their blood, that the world can never sleep as long as there is the faintest trace of a Jew.

I wonder how we survive. I marvel at the fact that we survive. For all their killing, for all their slaughter, we survive--and it is not a sword of man that kills the others, merely Time, just as it is not a miracle that preserves us, merely memory and persistence, and hope.

When I was fifteen years old a clarity came to me and I understood what the moshiach was. The moshiach is all of us and we will never embrace it because the world waits for something great while staring at its own reflection and misses the point.