The Soul Remembers

Bloodlines, Past Lives, and the Rising Storm We Can No Longer Ignore

There was a time—not so long ago—when antisemitism felt like an echo from another world. A black-and-white specter haunting old photographs, hushed school lessons, and the brittle letters my ancestors once mailed from across oceans of grief. It belonged to them—those who fled the burning shtetls, who watched their homes vanish beneath ash and smoke. Those who hid in cellars, who kissed their children goodbye in languages no longer spoken. Those whose forearms bore numbers, not tattoos, etched into flesh by hands that sought to erase them.

Their pain was sacred. But distant.

Like a candle lit in a temple, I dared not enter. I mourned for them as one mourns the mythic past. With reverence. With sorrow. But from afar.

And then the veil tore.

It didn’t knock. It didn’t whisper. It came screaming through headlines and hashtags. Through doorways once warmed by trust. It came wrapped in slogans. In keffiyehs worn not with culture, but with contempt. It arrived in social media. In schools. In spaces we once called community. And it didn't come alone—it brought numbers.

In 2024, the U.S. saw 9,354 antisemitic incidents—the highest number ever recorded. That’s one act of hate roughly every 56 minutes. The wave didn’t rise—it crashed: assaults, bomb threats, swastikas carved into sanctuary doors, Jewish students cornered for speaking Hebrew, colleagues parroting blood-stained slogans.

2025 has already underscored that the crest wasn’t a peak but a launching point: New York authorities report incidents continuing to climb this year; federal bulletins warn of an “elevated threat” to Jewish communities; and on June 1, 2025, a peaceful hostage-awareness gathering in Boulder, Colorado was firebombed with incendiary devices—elderly attendees burned, the attack investigated as terrorism—one of the year’s most searing reminders that what once crawled in the shadows now strides openly, cloaked in moral certainty and sharpened like a blade.

This isn’t fringe anymore.

It’s the main act.

And my ancestral blood—God help me—is boiling.Not poetically. Not symbolically. Cellularly. The ache rises not only in my heart but in my marrow. Something ancient is moving inside me, like a long-dormant flame rekindled by winds that have circled the Earth too many times.

It’s not just my outrage. It’s the cries of generations flaring in my ribcage. The songs of resistance hummed through teeth cracked by cold. The lullabies sung in darkness to children who would never see the morning. It is the pulse of the disappeared, rising again in me—not to destroy, but to bear witness. To remember. To refuse.

And here lies the paradox—the metaphysical current I must swim through.

Because I believe in soul lines.

That before I was this, I was many things. That my being stretches beyond this name, this body, this singular identity. That we are rivers braided through time, flowing through civilizations, through temples and battlefields, through peace and transgression alike.

In past lives, I may not have been Jewish. I may have spoken Persian beneath desert moons. Or carved runes in Norse stone. I may have worn Roman laurels—or shackles. I may have stood on the wrong side of the very wound that now bleeds in me.

And yet, this fire stirs.

Why?

Because ancestry is not merely genetic—it is energetic.

It moves through soul-memory like a tremor through glass. It doesn’t ask for permission. It simply arrives.

And it arrives now.

Because the cries of my ancestors are not simply echoing—they are summoning. And the soul remembers what the mind cannot: that hatred is a contagion. That history doesn’t repeat—it reemerges, wearing new clothes, speaking fluent prose, while carrying the same old knives.

We are not being called to pick sides.

We are being called to wake up.

To see how quickly justice becomes a weapon when wielded without memory. How empathy collapses when our only measure of worth is resemblance. How the soul—with its millions of lives and faces—must stand for humanity, not faction.

So I write this not with anger, but with flame.

Not a political flame. A primordial one.

The kind that burns not to consume, but to illuminate.

To watch antisemitism rise again is to stand at the edge of a spiritual cliff. A forgetting. And if we forget too long, we will fall—not only into bloodshed, but into soul-death. Into the slow erosion of what makes us human.

But I remember.

And perhaps, so do you.

Even if your past lives bore no Hebrew songs, even if your blood never passed through pogrom or ghetto, the soul knows injustice when it sees it. And the soul, if it’s awake, must respond.

Because this isn’t just about the Jews.

It’s about the eternal war between forgetting and remembrance. Between soul-silence and soul-fire.

I did not choose this fire.

But it chose me.

And I will not let it burn alone.