I haven’t written anything since before the war, because I didn’t know what to say. How to understand the momentous events. We all knew the world changed that black Sabbath, but what did it mean? How were we to make sense of it?
What felt like the antecedent to the war was the ferocious hatred between Jew and Jew. It culminated with an incident on Yom Kippur where religious Jews were attacked in Tel Aviv for praying in a gender segregated minyan (quorum of ten Jewish men). You could hear the footsteps of doom coming closer. Then came October 7th.
The barbarism of the attack, the brutality, the purposeful torture and murder of women, children and families, shocked us all. Then, a coordinated worldwide offensive against Jews began that put Jews on the defensive everywhere. Campuses became hostile places for Jews, and those Jews who were in league with progressive movements found themselves out in the cold. Jews learned once again that our politics and sympathies don’t matter. They throw us all into the same pot and turn up the heat.
What saved us were our soldiers, our prayers, the people of Israel and most of the Jews around the world rising up to help each other. While Israelis lost faith in government, the army came through. The stories of heroism on October 7th, of plain, ordinary people just picking up and going South and saving people under fire are legion. Then came the organized response. Young men everywhere left their families, their jobs and answered the call. They saw their friends die before their eyes. They suffered the trauma that war brings. So many died. A large part of the civilian population was traumatized. One mother told of children who were afraid to go to the bathroom. Let’s face it, in Sderot you only have 10 seconds once the siren sounds to get to a shelter. Imagine living like that. Another mother told me of the five-year-old who wouldn’t go back to Gan (Kindergarten) because last time she went her father left for miluim (reserve duty) and she insisted on being home hoping that any minute he would return. Then there were the faces. A trip to Reim where from the Nova music festival 334 killed, 40 taken hostages, many, many wounded; you see their faces on poster sized pictures, hear the stories. They were so young. One of the survivors was the daughter of our apartment manager in Herzliya. She told us of running into the bomb shelter when the bullets started flying with several dozen others. The Hamas terrorists kept throwing in hand grenades. A young man at the door kept throwing them out until one got past him. Then they sprayed the inside with machine gun fire. Our friend’s daughter told us how, severely wounded, she hid under dead bodies. Finally, the father of one of the girls in the shelter found them and rescued them. The faces seen almost daily of soldiers killed first in Gaza then in Lebanon. So many widows, many pregnant, with kids who will never know their father. Missiles came from Gaza, Lebanon, the Houtis in Yemen, Iraq and occasional mass barrages from Iran, along with constant unrest in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). Sirens and bomb shelters were a daily occurrence in much of the country.
Then our soldiers began to prevail. Gaza turned to rubble, the leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah were decapitated, exploding pagers destroyed not only the top tier of Hezbollah warriors but brought despair. Iran’s missiles were countered and destroyed twice yet they were completely vulnerable to the attacks by Israel. Eventually Donald Trump won the election by a significant majority. The axis of evil — Iran, Hezbollah, Syria, Hamas, and the Houthis, began to crumble and Hezbollah sued for a cease fire. As yet no one has talked about Peace, but at least a ceasefire seems doable. With Syria’s Assad fleeing the country and the overthrow of his regime the region seems poised for a major reorganization.
In America, most of her Jews rose to the occasion, but what was wall to wall unanimity in Israel, with the enemy on the doorstep, and sometimes in their living rooms, was a divisive issue amongst many American Jews and a large segment of the Democratic Party. In a recent survey by Mosaic, an organization that promotes Jewish/Israel education, it was shown that 37% of American Jewish teens sympathized with Hamas and 42% believed that Israel was committing genocide. What seemed so clear over there became so cloudy over here.
I’d been there before. I grew up in the Sixties, joined the Army. Cowboys and Indians, right? I had no clue! I remember riding in the back of a “six ton” (truck) with all of us singing “Where have all the flowers gone.” Then came Vietnam. Little did I know I was going into a meat grinder and I was the meat. I came back on a stretcher to a divided country. Very much like now. I remember the marches thinking, I agree with the sentiment that we shouldn’t be there. I saw it as a civil war that wasn’t our business, but my fellow students (I was at Brandeis) idolizing the Viet Cong, whom I knew as brutal butchers, not only of our soldiers but their own people. I figured these kids really had no clue as to what was really going on over there.
So what about today? What about all the “civilian” casualties, the accusations of genocide. Forget that the numbers are exaggerated and that a large percentage are Hamas terrorists. The reality is that in war innocents get killed. The question is who’s at fault? What can we do about it?
Back in the day, trudging through rice paddies, fighting through jungles we fought in a no purpose war and died like flies. Deaths of no meaning and no hope. Not so in Israel. If there ever was purpose in this world it is in this miniature State, this motley collection of cast off peoples from seventy nations with seventy languages, who have somehow come together to recreate a dream, the dream that we Jews actually have purpose. It’s not the purpose of gathering things, of furtive flings, of fads and fancies. It’s not for the cars, the jobs, the toys, the ever-climbing egos to mean something in a meaningless world. It’s not the emptiness of a rolling stone but of a people come home. Come home to where our roots sink deep, beyond the deepest history — to the beginnings of time and this world. Come home to our Holy purpose to do good on this earth. As the Prophet says, “For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of G-d from Jerusalem”. And we, this tiny band of brave Jews, standing up against evil in this world, hated from every corner of this earth, it’s our job to build on this earth a place that recalls the Garden put in Eden, and within our individual and collective lives create the blessings that HaShem has given to mankind to live in goodness all his days.
