8 months after the 7th
The still unfolding horror of October 7th is this: When everything suddenly, violently changed, it was not because something new and unprecedented happened. It’s because something very, very old happened…but now, it happened to us.
It wasn’t the chaotic crash of a giant chandelier. It was the unsealed yawning mouth of an ancient cave.
Since waking up to the rumbling earth and wailing skies that day, 8 months ago now (!), many of us have had the sense of time being ripped apart or scrambled. We wait as if any minute someone will come out and announce that it’s over. We hold on to the edge of that calendar day, suspended over a void, because it’s the last place we saw so many of them alive, the last time we saw ourselves as outside of the history we recite several times a year, but thought was safely closed up in long-diffused layers of ink.
But now: we know. We know. It’s not that time was shattered or frozen or melted; we are stubbornly seeing this wrong, like those Magic Eye illusions from the 90s.
Time has been glued together. It has been rhymed in Elegiac couplets. It has been folded. It’s a brain, an intestine, a strand of DNA, the passport line at a European airport: something coiled around itself and compressed, forgotten and remembered together. The points that touch are close and distant, advancing along the maze finds you right next to the place where you started.
They came in here and did what? How? We can’t believe it. What?!
On the other hand: Hey – Remember that time, in Aram? In Egypt? In Jerusalem? In Babylon? In Greece? In Persia? In Rome? In England? In France? In Spain? In Poland? In Hebron? In Germany? In Tunisia? In Morocco? In Iraq? In Russia?
It’s just a switch, not too complicated, but heavy. And over the course of a few terrible hours, they flipped it. They flipped it and much of the world said – is still saying, louder, every week – Yep! This is how we remembered the room! Thanks, Yahyah.
***
A German Jewish genius once observed that far from being separate, space and time are linked in a way that only other geniuses can understand; what that means, in addition to the invention of the GPS and rocket ships, is a variation in how different observers perceive where and when events occur.
The stuff of geeky science fiction or quirky time travel relationship dramas, spacetime has a deeply felt existential dimension for the Jewish people. Because our history is so long, but so continuous, and so much a part of our rituals, stories, and lives, we have a kind of receiver that picks up signals from other times and places and views them from the other side.
We are at a seder table in Los Angeles, leaving Egypt; at a wedding in Netanya, being carried to Rome; at a synagogue in London, fasting for three days in Persia; sitting on the floor in slippers in a rebuilt Jerusalem, crying about a destroyed one.
And you just saw a bunch of Jews, sitting, in 2024.
That’s why immediately, as you tried to get detailed information (and proof), we tried to find October 7th not on a calendar or a timeline of aggression, but on a graph. While you had trouble believing a strong, sovereign nation could be at the other end of this type of shocking medieval barbarism, and hatched conspiracies, we understood immediately that there is no amount of success or strength that can hermetically seal that cave.
There are attempts to compare Oct. 7th: to 9/11 (the surprise, the scale), to 1973 (the security failure, the national existential dread), to 1948 (hand-to-hand combat, temporary lack of sovereignty in part of the country), to 1938 (the programmatic, anti-Semitic rage, presaging something worse – bureaucratic, veiled, efficient), to 1648 or 1929 or 1941 (the barbarity and bloodlust of a pogrom) – and all of these ring through the valley of shadows.
They echo, they rhyme.
What’s different now is we have a lot more to say about the next stanza. That is what Israel is about.
But for an eternal people, with a well-developed internal locus of control, who not only survive but thrive, who have always expressly refused to hang too long by the calendar over the abyss – harming our place and our bodies leaves us once again walking on that proverbial narrow bridge at the edges of time.
And this is why the relentless online attempts to steal not only our self-determination and sovereignty but our humanity, our values, our history – clawing backward through the sands to steal things we know are ours, that have shaped us – is not the same old KGB-Arafat strategy trying to prove this place was someone else’s. It’s about a virus taking over a cell by attacking the DNA. By calling us the shadow.
They’ve jumped into an 80-year-old hole, reversed the players, and claimed the suffering and resilience and productive, creative life force of thousands of years. The nouveau riche history eyes the legacy history, also this!, with envy, even though we would have never chosen that history at all.
But it keeps choosing us, and, as they say on the socials, we are HERE FOR IT.
