At noon on October 7, when the Israel Hayom newsroom filled with stunned faces and an ocean of horror swept over the holiday, over WhatsApp and every aspect of Israeli life, we already understood – this was a "war for the home."
That was our main headline the morning after. Images of pogroms from living rooms, from Shabbat tables, from children's rooms, from clinics, from bases, from fields and roads and squares – threatened to penetrate every home in the country. Even Israelis living hundreds of kilometers from the south felt the walls of home collapsing, and that tremor of uprootedness, which we mistakenly thought no longer nested in Israeli DNA after two thousand years of exile.
But like in exile, the hostages were taken on bayonets from their homes. From their beds. From safe rooms by their stubborn handles. From parties with friends from the community. They were torn from within the daily Israeli promise – which evaporated at 6:29 in the morning.
Their pure anonymity was violated and trampled. Overnight, 251 men and women, boys and girls, became a living monument to the great failure. Their disappearance cried out to us from the depths for two years. As some of them returned to us, as some were murdered, as some starved – that cry only grew stronger.
And when the home is shaken, when doubt is cast upon it, its residents rush to save it. "Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken," wrote Ecclesiastes. Abandonment became mobilization, became a powerful tailwind, of the generation of heroism, which turned its back on the stigmas attached to it and ran to fight for the home.
The thread did not break. 914 IDF soldiers have fallen since that Black Saturday until yesterday. Tens of thousands were wounded. Hundreds of thousands of reservists sacrificed their family routines, the stability of their livelihoods, so that the threefold cord would not break. And against all odds – against the conception that the State of Israel is not built for long wars, against isolation and international back-turning, against the lack of equality in burden – the cord did not break. But it stretched immeasurably.
The heavy price we paid, now we must fix. The great price that the State of Israel has paid since October 7 – must pay off. The home is not in doubt, but precisely its stability requires us to seek repair for it. Symbolic that the hoped-for return of the hostages and ceasefire come during the Sukkot holiday – when we leave our permanent dwelling for temporary housing, to contemplate the essence of home. We must not be mistaken: the war over it is not yet over. It is multi-arena: in hearts, in streets, in the conversation between us.
If we succeed in building a sukkah that is both shelter and invitation – for soul-searching, for reconciliation, for repair – perhaps we can say, for the first time since that terrible morning, that the home stands. Not just on its foundations, but also on its principles.
Omer Lachmanovitch is the editor-in-chief of Israel Hayom.
