Like much of the rest of the planet, I went to see the massively hyped new adaptation of The Odyssey. I have my own reservations about the film, reservations already picked apart in a thousand video essays, but there is one angle I have not heard anyone raise. Sitting in the dark, I heard the mythic words booming from the speakers, and my mind didn’t drift to ancient Greece. It went somewhere a lot more domestic.

Early on, I watched the horse wheeled through the gates of an impenetrable city, and Odysseus and his men spilling out to take it from the inside. And all I could see was our own morning. October 7th, the walls we believed in giving way, the breach that nearly took us down. Troy fell because it trusted what it let inside. I understood the feeling better than I wanted to.

For the rest of the runtime, I watched Odysseus live out Nostos, the agonizing, decade-long struggle simply to get home. It is a pain we now understand intimately. For so many Israelis, there has........

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