A Beacon From Zion Shines After 10/7

A Beacon From Zion Shines After 10/7

Arise, shine, for your light has come
– Isaiah 60:1

On October 7 (Black Saturday), 2023, a young woman was at the Nova festival when Hamas terrorists began their horrific invasion. Yuval Raphael survived by hiding under a pile of dead bodies. She went on to represent Israel and place second at the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest. Her journey exemplifies the Jewish experience as she revealed hope in the midst of despair.

Today, a younger generation of Jews is stunned by the evil of Hamas and the ensuing shunning by erstwhile friends whose Progressive sensitivities metastasized into hatred of Jews.[1] For them, this time is different. Their parents lived with the burden of the ghosts of pogroms and the Holocaust, and memories of raw antisemitism. But for many of these young Jews, horror and hatred was not part of their lived experience; it was the past history of their grandparents. As they struggle to meet the challenge of this historical moment, they seek guidance on how to answer back.[2]  

There are no clever stories to fall back on. But against the dark nights in the lives of some of the greatest Jews, there is a narrative thread of hope and courage that has been woven over millennia into the tapestry of Jewish life.[3] Judaism creates habits that defeat the despair bred into Jews by centuries of stress, manifesting as fear, tormenting self-doubts, and self-hatred.[4] Jews are not allowed to be victims; they are to learn to mourn and carry on. The positive significance of Judaism in their lives is an understanding that the future is open and nothing is inevitable, and a call to act. As written in Proverbs (6:9), 

O lazy one, how long will you lie [there]; when will you get up from your sleep?

Jews have embraced thousands of years being different with a healthy dose of unapologeticism. The Jewish people do not believe that the moral universe is an arc that bends toward goodness. We fight to defend G-d’s justice because it will not happen by itself. Jews accept being a chosen people with a special responsibility, even if that separates us from the non-Jewish world. Our aspiration is to transcend our environment, as dark as it may be at times, and be a shining beacon of hope[5] and success (hatzlachah),[6] even if it comes at a heavy cost. 

At the beginning, G-d called out to Adam and asked (Genesis 3:9), “Where are you?” This is the first question in existence, and G-d asks why we are not acting as He intended. This is not a duty or expectation that men and women can hide from. Jews may be powerful in our convictions, but courage and action is what is needed. When the world fails to save our innocent babies–Kfir and Ariel, brutally murdered in captivity–we need to sing out in protest and reaffirm our individual obligations and roles in our shared fate.[7] This is what Yuval Raphael did for me and for us when she crawled out from under the heaviness of the fallen and sang her song, that a New Day Shall Rise.

Endnotes

1. Cf., M. Tracy & C. Robertson,”‘I Was Very Alone Today’: Young Jewish Americans Grieve Over Israel,“ New York Times, October 14, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/14/us/israel-jewish-americans-youth.html
2. Hugging is not the solution. See, Proverbs 6:10-11.
3. According to Rabbi Sacks, the Bible is “one of the great literatures of hope.” https://rabbisacks.org/quotes/optimism-and-hope/
4. Cf., S. Glenn, The Vogue of Jewish Self-Hatred in Post– World War II America, Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 12, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2006), https://history.washington.edu/sites/history/files/documents/research/12.3glenn.pdf
5. Cf., Isaiah 60:1-3, https://www.sefaria.org/Isaiah.60.1?lang=bi
6. Cf., J. Sinclair, Hatzlachah, Jewish Chron. (May 20, 2025), https://www.thejc.com/judaism/jewish-words/hatzlachah-aadydep4
7. Cf., “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? And if not now, when?” Rabbi Hillel, Pirkei Avot 1:14, https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_Avot.1.14?lang=bi