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October 7 Anniversary Message

“How is one to communicate that which by its very nature defies language?” asked Nobel Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel. “How is one to explain the inexplicable? And then, how can one be sure that the words, once uttered, will not betray, distort the message they bear?”

The tsunami of evil that engulfed the State of Israel on October 7, 2023 defies language. The Hamas fanatical terrorists and their allies perpetrated acts of such murderous inhuman carnage that overwhelms the soul to contemplate.

Israeli poet Eva Murciano captures this spiritual challenge in her poem “After That Terrible Day”

When I tried to write poetry
After that terrible day
The words fell face down on the ground
In a haphazard pile of crying and fear
And when I was again able to write poetry
After that terrible day
It emerged diminished in
Tiny notes
Tentative steps
On matchstick feet
Ashamed it does not have
Words enough.

We remember this anniversary by its date on our calendar – the Seventh of October. But in Hebrew it is called שבעה באוקטובר – Shivah B’October. There is a sense that since that black sabbath the entire nation of Israel has been in mourning – a Shivah that never seems to end.

Poet Tali Asher writes about how all of us are in mourning. There are those who perished, and their immediate families and communities grieve their deaths. There are those still missing, and their loved ones wonder each day if they are alive and will ever return home. There are those who bear the scars and disfigurement of wounds, and others whose wounds lie within that may never heal. There are those still displaced from their homes in the north and the south, who wonder what their future will be. There are thousands serving in combat and in reserve duty, spending months away from their families and their lives, living moment to moment in harm’s way.

Shiva is a time when we shelter at home. We do not push the grief away, but literally sit in it. We allow ourselves the space to mourn, bouncing moment to moment between disbelief and sadness and anger and despair and acceptance and resolve.

On this first yahrtzeit, we consider our wounds. They have yet to heal. We are not whole. The pain still makes us cry out. The soul lacks the right words, and so it screams out in pain, or sits in mournful silence.

This year challenged the Jewish soul like no other in recent memory. “There is a people that dwells apart,” Bil’am noted in the Book of Numbers, “not reckoned among the nations.” (Numbers 23:9) We have felt alone, uncounted, dehumanized: our pain ignored, our enemies championed, our right to defend ourselves questioned.

As the Haggadah reminds us, this is not the first time our enemies rose to attack us. And the sad reality we faced this last year is that the virus of antisemitism is still very potent.

We lament that humanity is so susceptible to the plague of hatred, so prone to fanatical myopia, so often given over to callousness, violence, indecency, and inhumanity. And we too must admit, that our people is not immune from these infections.

So how can we mark this dreaded anniversary, this awful yahrtzeit that arrives today?

First, we must continue to raise our voices as loudly as we can that our enemies be forced to release every single one of the hostages they hold without any further delay. It should have been yesterday. Today would be fine. Tomorrow is late. The day after, unacceptable.

Second, we must resolve that our anguish and our pain will not drag us into pits of despair, into cesspools of resentment or cauldrons of hate. We must use this yahrtzeit – in the middle of the Days of Awe – to reorient our people’s compass toward all that we have stood for over the centuries. We must recommit to building our world on a foundation of our core values – to lift up the downtrodden, to protect the vulnerable, to welcome the stranger, to pursue justice, to love our neighbor, to not stand idly by, and to work for peace.

And as our tradition teaches us, we will persevere, asserting our rights to live in safety, in dignity, and in freedom, in our ancestral and modern homeland, and in every land where we make our homes.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks wrote: “Judaism is a sustained struggle, the greatest ever known, against the world that is, in the name of the world that could be, should be, but is not yet. … Judaism is the religion, and Israel the home, of hope.”

On this yahrtzeit, we will turn to one another. We will hold each other. We will cry with each other. And we will dry our tears, lift our heads, and continue to work for the world we want to see – a world where our enemies finally lay down their weapons and cease in their attempts to bring us harm, a world where we extend our hands in peace, a world that is built on a foundation of love and understanding, compassion and justice. A world that one day soon, we pray, will be at peace.

 

Rabbi Dan Levin
Temple Beth El of Boca Raton

“Pray for the peace of Jerusalem…”

 

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