Born on the 7th of October

I was born on the seventh of October, by all accounts an inconspicuous date to be born, save for being the birthday also of Vladimir Putin. All of this changed last year, of course, the year I turned 32. My husband and I were in the final stretch of our aliyah procedure; we had just notified our advisor that we had (finally) gathered all of the necessary documents and were ready to proceed. I wasn’t planning a great big party for my birthday. Maybe a nice dinner — I frankly no longer remember. I do remember that when the first news from Israel trickled in, we understood that there had been an infiltration of some sort, but greatly underestimated its magnitude.

Of October 7, 2023, I remember most of all the people: I remember armed men darting through the streets like rabid animals, the men on motorized paragliders floating gently through the air to wreak havoc on the ground. I remember Shani Louk with her body desecrated, I remember Naama Levy glancing backward, I remember the little redheads from the Bibas family. These people were in my thoughts on our aliyah flight from Budapest with then-Foreign Affairs and now-Defense Minister Israel Katz when we left for Israel in June of 2024 (he was of course less on our flight with us than we were on his flight, and not really with him, but that is beside the point). Five months have passed since that day, five months since we became Israeli.

“Is this your first war?” the stout little Tunisian sitting beside me at the cafe asks. Well, yes, I think to myself, there are no wars in Europe. But of course there are, now. He asks this because of my nervous inquiries about whether I ought to procure a battery radio to listen to the news if the power goes out. He is a seasoned veteran, having lived here for decades. I just got here. But I get where he’s coming from: sitting in sunny Netanya, the beauty of this country feels incongruous. The placid ocean, the idling clouds, the eternal sunshine; it all seems like a mistake on part of the set designer. This ought to be a gloomy time in a place of unforgiving wind and unrelenting rain. Also incongruous is the absence of wartime doom and gloom from daily life: the impossible peacefulness of a Shabbat like any other, dark clouds swirling above the palace in time notwithstanding. 

Israel is a land of images, of vision. Pictures like an old Hasid in beard and hat swooshing past on an electric scooter. Crowds of people, dressed in white, flooding the town square after the sun sets on Yom Kippur. Familiar faces gathered around holiday tables, the flag of Israel waving in the wind. But also, skies lit up by the hundreds of missiles, or rather their miraculous interceptions. Rockets caught midair over the sky of Safed, missiles barreling towards Haifa. These I thankfully did not see firsthand because I was huddled in the mamad with my sleeping cat and equanimous husband; I saw images of it later.

The thing about Israel that irks so many of its detractors is that it is a healthy society. There are problems, sure, but problems of a larger, more general nature — problems which do not ordinarily trickle down to people’s day-to-day lives. These problems do not influence the people’s respect for the elderly, their wish to help those in need, their sense of community, of shared destiny no matter from where you returned to this country… these are things that have gone missing from large swaths of the Western world today, and remain abstract, inapplicable ideas in countless places outside of it. Israeli society may be fragmented along an immeasurable number of lines — politics, religion and the observance thereof, culture, customs, heritage, language — but it is still, in a much bigger way, united. Flags fly everywhere, the sounds of spontaneously sung anthems are carried by the wind. People feel this place is theirs to improve, protect and love. The diaspora settling back the land has brought with itself traces of elsewhere, and the flavors, words and customs from various nations come together to form one cohesive whole stemming from a more profound connection, like many kinds of icing on a substantial, ancient, cake.

And all of this in the face of immense, often insurmountable challenges. This is also why the politics and the personal intersect in ways they just do not, elsewhere: the protests for the hostages every Saturday night, the American election, the firing of Gallant, the thoughts of the incoming US ambassador to Israel about the West Bank, Bibi’s trials, the enlistment of the Haredim, what to do about Iran, the Saudis, Russia, the United Nations. The one hundred and one Israelis either living in captivity, or suspended in an unknown period of mourning begun on an unmarked day. The far too many soldiers fallen in battlefields in the north, in the south, a stone’s throw from where Israelis go about their day in either direction.

I am constantly aware of having arrived at a unique time: Israel is at a turning point. No longer the same country it was before October 7, it likely never will be. It is often the fate of the leaders of the Jewish people not to witness the fruits of their labor: Moses was not granted entry to the promised land, Herzl died before he could see the State of Israel established, and Golda passed away before the implementation of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty. Will Bibi, in a metaphorical, political sense, live to see the dawn of a new Israel, a thing of his creation, for better or for worse, the birth pangs of which began in the early morning hours of October 7?