The Second Anniversary
October 7 is now behind us, but it will never truly fade from view. Despite the fact that it came this past Tuesday, the first day of Sukkot on this year’s calendar, it was widely observed in quiet gatherings, both in the cities of Israel and the world Jewish community. This, despite the fact that the tradition forbids it. When mourning coincides with a Jewish holiday, it is mourning that must give way to joy. Not this time. Not this year. The trauma of 2023 is still too fresh.
That part, regrettably, has been lost in what followed. All of us have seen the pictures of Gaza. A dusty heap of concrete rubble. The twisted remains of a fence, a shopping cart. No preliminary agreement can erase those imprints. Regardless of what happens in Qatar or Cairo, I do not yet see the possibility of a future. All that remains is for the little robot of WALL-E to pile the debris into towers of ruin. More bodies will likely emerge from the scrap heaps, added to the thousands that have already been buried.
I know that Israelis have seen them, too. The plan by the government was to block those images, to prevent the flow of information from Gaza. Israel may control the local news, but the Internet is flooded with footage of the catastrophe. When thousands of Gazans have tried to escape the bombing raids, there has always been a drone to record the moment. Any one who wants can see the footage for themselves.
But what is lost in all of this is the point of origin. Whatever happened after the events of October 7, the day itself remains a pool of blood, drenched in the rage and savagery of Hamas. Whatever else, it echoes with what came before it in stories I have known almost the whole of my life. Ask me what happened in July 1941 when the local citizens of Jedwabne, Poland herded their Jewish neighbors into a synagogue and burned men and women and children alive. I will tell you a story no less terrible than October 7.
The assault by Hamas was not a Holocaust. It was not an instance of industrial killing. But it was a terrible orgy of violence, inflcted on civilians caught by surprise, many of them incinerated in the “safe rooms” of their homes. Young people were decapitated. Women were raped. Elderly Jews were dragged to the tunnels of Gaza where hostages are still shackled in the dark.
What happened next was deeply troubling: a disproprotionate extermination of civilians in Gaza that, as of today, has not quite come to an end. This despite the promising news of a settlement. Part of it has been political opportunism, expansionist zeal, and a kind of crackpot messianism. But part of it was also the play of trauma in the unhealed psyche of the Jewish People. October 7 was not supposed to happen. The State of Israel was supposed to have prevented it. For eighty years we have recited a sacrament that pledged the army to “Never Again.” What do you do when the State fails in its duty and over a thousand citizens are slaughtered overnight? There’s a very good chance that you might go berserk.
I do not know what will happen next. The cynic in me says that negotiations are not over. Hamas is relentless and Netanyahu flees from resolution. Trump did the right thing by strong-arming everyone, but that may not hold in the days ahead. And yet whatever fails to align in this constellation, I know that the cause of the People Israel is not lost and my own capacity for empathy is not exhausted. On one side, I see the Palestinian children of Gaza. On the other, I see my own brothers and sisters tortured by the facts of our bloody history and searching for a way to extricate themselves from bloodshed.
It won’t come soon, but it may come in time. The challenge for all of us is to see the suffering before us and to reckon with a dispute that is old and fraught. No one here has a monopoly on truth. No one here has a monopoly on virtue.