It happened in the middle of an unremarkable Ontario Walmart, in the back-to-school section, under the fluorescent lights.

My four-year-old son was trying on a bright red backpack for his first day of kindergarten. It was much too large for him, as backpacks often are on small children, hanging low on his body and pulling slightly at his shoulders. He turned around so I could see it. He was proud of himself. He was excited. He had the look of a child standing at the edge of something enormous and believing, because he is loved, that the world waiting for him must be good.

It is one of the cruelties of parenthood that you can be standing beside your child in a perfectly ordinary place, buying a perfectly ordinary thing, when fear suddenly enters the room and rearranges your life.

In that moment, the thought came without warning:

Will he be safe in Canada as a Jew?

Not in the abstract way Jews are accustomed to asking this question. Not historically. Not philosophically. Not as one more entry in the long ledger of Jewish anxiety. I meant, would he be safe in that backpack, in that classroom, on that playground, in that country?

I looked at him and knew that I was not alone in questioning this as a father.

And as a father, I knew the answer.

Or near enough to no that pretending otherwise would have been its own kind of betrayal.

That was the moment I began leaving Canada. Not with a plan. Not with boxes or paperwork or a destination. But inwardly. Quietly. Irrevocably. Something in me had crossed a border before the rest of us did.

For months before that, my wife and I had been having the conversations that many Jewish families began having after October 7th. They took place late at night, after the children were asleep, when the house had gone quiet and the day’s obligations could no longer keep gnawing concerns at bay.

What if this gets worse?

What if this is not temporary?

What if the country we thought we lived in is no longer the country we are living in?

We resisted the conclusion for as long as we could. Canada was home. We had fallen in love there. We had become parents there. We had built a life out of routines and friendships and obligations. We had given ourselves to community. We had a map of belonging: schools, synagogues, parks, familiar roads, the places where a family deposits its memories without realizing that one day it may have to retrieve them in a hurry.

We told ourselves what Jews in comfortable countries have always told themselves when the air around them changes.

We will not be frightened out.

There is dignity in that instinct. There is courage in it, too. But there is also a danger in mistaking it for wisdom. Adults can make arguments out of suffering. Adults can transfigure fear into principle. Adults can convince themselves that to remain is noble because the alternative is too painful to contemplate.

Children clarify things.

I could choose risk for myself and call it courage. I could not choose it for my son and call it the same thing.

This is what public language so often fails to capture. Antisemitism is discussed as an issue, a phenomenon, a challenge to pluralism, a failure of social cohesion. It is analyzed, condemned, contextualized, panelled, and put into reports. But for Jewish parents it is not an abstraction. It is a physical sensation. It is the pause before sending your child to school. It is the calculation you make when he says something Jewish in public. It is the tightening in your chest when you hear that another Jewish school has been shot at and then watch your government respond as if the problem were simply something to........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)