Los Angeles: Out of the Fire, a Love that Grows from Afar

It is the fabric of myth and fantasy — the fiery images materializing endlessly on my phone. I think constantly about the smoke in the usually clear Los Angeles skies, all the toxins and poisons released into the air, even though I am no longer close enough to breathe it. I sense sorrow pressing into me and I realize that I feel guilty for leaving the city I love, full of the people who have become a part of who I am. A city can be like a lover, I think to myself, and the price of abandoning someone you love is to love from afar. In the worst of times, this is a painful penalty.

My husband pointed it out to me the other night: “You just said ‘home’ when you referred to LA.” It was more of an observation than an accusation, but that one word contained a sea of meaning because I have a home that is not LA, and it’s a home I love. I’m happy in Italy. It’s beautiful and peaceful. The food is amazing. I have a wonderful community of friends. I don’t worry about the things that plagued me in LA, namely the crime that was skyrocketing in my Studio City neighborhood and the 911 calls that went unanswered because the police had been defunded. 

We left LA because it didn’t feel like the city I had fallen in love with so many years ago, and I was resentful. I grew up in Southern California, but did not move to LA until 2008, when I got my first job out of graduate school — a postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA. I taught there for a number of years, and then I took a position at Pepperdine University in Malibu. My first LA apartment was on 11th Street in Santa Monica. My neighbor, Rachel, became my best friend. Earlier this week that apartment was two blocks away from a mandatory evacuation zone. 

Moving to LA didn’t change my life. It was bigger than that; it’s the place where everything that matters most began, the place where I met some of the most important people in my life, the place my son was born, and, when I moved to Pico-Robertson, the place where being Jewish took on a whole new meaning: unmatched Shabbat dinners, the ability to visit a different shul every week for a year and still have more to choose from, the clamor and chaos of shopping at Pico Glatt on a Friday morning, learning with one of my favorite rabbis at Delice Bakery, running into Jews everywhere. I felt a deep sense of awe and belonging in LA.

Even with all of its flaws, Los Angeles is still a special place. And I admit: As much as I loved it when I lived there, being far away from my city has given me an even greater love for it. Sometimes we can’t see everything clearly when we are standing on top of it, wrestling inside of it. And now, bearing witness to this terrifying time of fire along with everyone else, it’s all I can think about. What’s happening now is a collective tragedy that we cannot even begin to talk about because we are still in it. And even after the fires, what will be left to say in the face of such loss?

“There is no reaching the disaster,” wrote the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot. We cannot use words to adequately convey the profound loss and trauma of such catastrophes. And I don’t want to try. After all, I moved away from LA. Is it even my disaster to reach? Have I forfeited the right to lay claim to it with my words and feelings? It feels like a wrongful trespass to use words to give shape and meaning to it when I have the luxury (and penalty) of loving from afar. But maybe that is exactly what I have: love.

Smoke clouds unfurl over skies that hang above one of the largest Jewish populations in the world, billowing smoke conjures up images of war, destruction and apocalypse: I’m not there so I have no right to fit myself into this tragedy. Especially not when so many people have lost all that they have worked for in the blink of an eye. To write about my own sadness borders on offensive.

I’m reminded that God and history often speak from fire. The bush that burned before Moses contained both a promise and a threat. When he heard his name emanating from the flames, Moses answered, “Here I am,” three words signifying responsibility. Here I am. I think, now, that this is what we — those who have not lost homes and livelihoods — are called to offer in the face of the flames, in the face of tragedy so great we dare not put words to it. We can say here I am to give, to help, and to love.

I’ve struggled to name the emotions and sensations that have been welling up inside of me the past week as I’ve spent every second watching LA from afar. But love can be confusing. One minute we want nothing more than to spend every waking second in the arms of someone we love; in the next, we want nothing more than to be rid of them because we have been disappointed or can no longer trust them because they made bad decisions. And then before we know it, all we remember is the love we feel. Take me back, I didn’t mean it, says the lover who has abandoned her love and just wants to come home.

So even if I cannot, will not, find the words to describe the unfathomable trauma that LA is experiencing, I know that there is a language without words, and we call it love.

Monica Osborne is a former professor of literature, critical theory, and Jewish studies. She is Editor at Large at The Jewish Journal and is author of “The Midrashic Impulse.” X @DrMonicaOsborne