Several days ago, I listened to the anguished words of a 19-year-old survivor of the massacre at Kibbutz Be’eri. She felt that what happened there was not different, just far worse than what had gone on for years in her home and the region, which suffered as entire communities were left unprotected. This time was no different, just worse. As I listened with compassion to her authentic words, I could not agree. This is not more of the same.
The suffering at the southern border which included the slaughter of an entire family to relentless bus bombings in past years, somehow still seemed a world apart from atrocities of the more distant past – from the Khmelnytsky pogroms to the Farhud and the Holocaust – when we had no state that we could call our sovereign home.
For years, I always felt something was amiss in the Ashkenazi prayer service on Yom Kippur. I resented that the liturgy of the Ten Martyrs of Ancient Rome was recited in the aftermath of the sacred service of the priests.
A horrific tragedy that we can bounce back from
Why were those lurid murders held over our heads? Could not that martyrdom be preserved for commemoration elsewhere? We now live in Israel, our guarantor of protection from the past. An elementary school classmate, who had grown up to become a professor, said that our generation won the lottery of Jewish history. Was that not true? And a luminary of our times, Natan Sharansky, assured us that Israel is the Garden of Eden, even if it is a paradise in need of repair.
But on the Sabbath of Simchat Torah, history came crashing down on us, too heavy to bear. I recall a story I thought I had forgotten. It happened to friends of my parents, in Jackson Heights, the striving, working-middle-class neighborhood where I grew up. Those friends lived in the same row of red-brick apartment buildings that we called home.
There had been a gas leak in their kitchen. The entire family gradually fell into a near coma, but Rose, a tall, too-thin, middle-aged woman, managed to drag her large athletic husband and three gangly teenage boys out of their apartment in time to save their lives. I recall my father’s wondrous response: How were you able to do that? She, a Holocaust survivor, responded, “I lost my parents and my sisters and brothers to lethal gas. I could not allow that to happen to my husband and children.”
I FEEL her spirit in the bred-in-the-bone courage of Jews from all walks of life in Israel in recent weeks. And for that matter, the nobility seems to be embedded in the DNA of many of our country’s non-Jewish citizens, and even among sojourners in our land. We will not allow this evil to bend us and make us fall. Like my skinny but determined neighbor, we will pull ourselves out of the rubble by sheer force of will.
And if our ragtag and hopelessly dysfunctional government fails us, the sturdy citizens of our state will take charge. Is it truly because we have nowhere else to go, as President Biden quoted Golda Meir? Not only that. It is also because there is nowhere else that most of us would rather be.
Even as we live with the nightmare of hostages ripped from their families and forced across the border, that earth-shattering fireball of evil has also released the light of our grace. The Nation of Israel Lives.
We suffer blows and we recover. I recall my sixth-grade teacher tracing in chalk the arcs of Jewish history on a timeline she drew on the board. Rise and fall, fall and rise, from the destruction of the Ancient Temples to the Middle Ages; the Enlightenment, the Holocaust, and the calamities that befell communities of the East, to the crowning redemption of the State of Israel. Our teacher strode down the full length of the board, her bifocals dangling on their chain, chalk in hand, almost at the classroom door. She reached the very edge of the board, what we all believed to be the final fall, and also the last ascent.
But decades after I absorbed that lesson, we are hit with an unforeseen shock to our history-battered souls. Have we survived the millennia only to be beaten in the 21st century? If, even for a split-second, we forget who we are and why we are still here, we have voices to remind us. Among those that resonate with me the most strongly, is that of the journalist and humanist Lucy Aharish. She, a native Arabic speaker, reminds us and the world, in English and Hebrew, of why we are still here. Stand with us on the right side of history. Her words ring true.
The author is a writer and an editor. She was born in New York, and has lived in Jerusalem for many years. She is the author of the children’s book, I am Israeli (2016, Mitchell-Lane).