Oct. 7, 2023, the day of the murderous Hamas attack, was one of the darkest days in Israeli history. For a day, the area known as the Gaza periphery was not part of Israel. There was no intelligence to provide warning, no security forces to provide protection, and no state to fulfill its duties.
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Technically speaking the massacre occurred within the borders of Israel, but Israel was not there. Technically speaking, the massacre occurred after 1948, when the Jews had a safe haven, but on that day – they were in exile.
Video: Volunteer describes horrific aftermath of Hamas onslaught / Credit: ZAKA Search and Rescue
That dark day changed us. We are no longer the same people, no longer the same country. That day changed us because we experienced Jewish history firsthand.
Jewish history repeating itself
For almost two millennia, the Jewish people did not have a state or the independent ability to protect themselves. The Zionist movement was founded by individuals who realized that the world was an unfriendly place for the Jews.
In 1903, Ze'ev Jabotinsky visited Chișinău after the bloody pogrom that shocked and terrified worldwide Jewry and became synonymous with the worst horrors of Diaspora persecution.
Jabotinsky later described that while walking the streets of the city where Jews had been murdered and raped and their synagogues destroyed he found a parchment of a Torah scroll that survived with the word "foreign land" inscribed.
In a poem written after the visit, Jabotinsky said that within those two words hid all the murderous pogroms of history.
The same is true of the Worms and Mainz massacres, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Khmelnytsky riots – they all boil down to two words: "foreign land". When the Jews have no power, they are slaughtered.
This insight laid the foundation of Zionism. This simple understanding – that the alternative to Jewish sovereignty is Chișinău – was engraved in the consciousness of the generation that founded the State of Israel.
A miracle state
The generation of the founding fathers lived in two eras: the one before the Jews had a state and the one after. That is why they knew they could not take the existence of Israel for granted, and understood that it could disappear, which is why they invested in it, nurtured it, and devoted themselves to it.
This appreciation decreased somewhat when the second generation came along, although it still considered the existence of a national home for the Jewish people a miracle that must be appreciated.
The third generation began to forget the miracle. It was born in a reality where Israel was a given and it could not even imagine a word without a Jewish state in it. Time took its toll.
As for the current, fourth generation, the Jewish state is a given and seems stable, strong, and eternal.
Perhaps it's a fourth-generation characteristic. That is what happened during the First Temple period in the days of King Solomon and King David when sovereignty began to disintegrate in the eighth decade by the fourth generation. The same is true of the Second Temple Period, during the Hasmonean rule, when sovereignty began to disintegrate in the eighth decade by the fourth generation.
Miracles are forgotten in the fourth generation when everything becomes a given. That is when we tend to quarrel, fight, and dismantle it all from within. This is one of the deep paradoxes of human existence: When we believe that reality is stable – it falls apart; when we are aware that reality can at any moment fall apart – it remains stable.
Jewish history sent a message on Oct. 7. On that day, we were in a "foreign land." We all experienced that dark day: we were in exile, we were in a reality where there was no Jewish state, and we were reminded that the alternative to a Jewish state was Chișinău.
Now we are different people. We have acquired the perspective of the first generation. The founders witnessed the reality where there was no state, so they knew how to appreciate its existence. And just like them, we – Israelis who live on the other side of the Oct. 7 massacre – also witnessed the reality in which we don't have a country. In other words, we, the members of the fourth generation, now look at reality through the lenses of the first generation.
And perhaps it's not just a metaphor. Maybe we haven't just acquired the perspective of the founders, but are the founders. It wasn't just one concept that shattered on Oct. 7, it was many. And after all the things we had taken for granted were shaken and all our paradigms collapsed, a new humility will now begin to emerge in the minds of many Israelis. The understanding that we do not understand. It's a humility that will only increase. We are entering a war that Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz so aptly described as "the realm of uncertainty."
We went through, and we continue to go through, an earthquake that shatters all our beliefs and all our governing paradigms. The meaning of this mental earthquake is dramatic: After the war, everything is on the table – from the state's contract with the ultra-Orthodox community through the state's welfare mechanisms to the drafting of a constitution.
Next to the growing modesty, there is another sentiment that appears in full force. The feeling that this country belongs to us, to its citizens. When you look around and see the thousands of volunteers and the hundreds of initiatives that are popping up to make up for the weakness of the state mechanisms – what are you actually looking at?
You are witnessing a phenomenon that is rare and extraordinarily powerful. You are witnessing that the Israeli people feel a sense of responsibility and ownership of the state.
And what happens when you combine the two? What happens when the humility that comes from the perceptual earthquake merges with the citizens' sense of responsibility and a sense of shared responsibility for their country? They signal to us that after the war we will receive from history an unrepeatable opportunity: the opportunity to re-establish the State of Israel.
Thanks to this new-found humility, we have the opportunity to say goodbye to what was. Thanks to the sense of shared responsibility, we have the opportunity to re-establish what will be.
We must not forget that on Oct. 7, we met not only the absolute evil that came from Gaza but also the absolute good: of the police officers, the commanders, and the soldiers – each and every one of them heroes of Israel.
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We must not forget that along with the pure evil of Hamas, we also saw the pure goodness of the volunteers and the tremendous strength of the citizens. When we rebuild the state, it will be a state that will succeed in doing what the current state fails to do: succeed in reflecting our strengths on the surface and the goodness of Israeli society at the core.
The Torah says that the world was created twice: the first time in six days and the second time after the flood. The tablets, too, were given twice: the first set, which Moses shattered, and the second set when the Jewish people were forgiven.
Future historians will say that Israel was built twice as well: the first time in 1948 and the second time, after the flood on Oct. 7 when all assumptions and tablets were broken.
