Do Not Be Afraid

Three years ago tomorrow, many of us in the diaspora learned the news in pieces. It was a holy day. Phones were off, and the news seeped in through a neighbor’s whisper, a rabbi’s hushed announcement, a friend who finally checked a screen. In Israel it was Simchat Torah, the day we finish the scroll and begin again. For us it was Shemini Atzeret, with the dancing still a night away. By the time we understood, something had already broken that couldn’t be put back.

I have been thinking since then about a phrase that appears again and again in the Torah: al tira. Do not be afraid.

God says it to Abraham, alone and childless, in the opening lines of a promise. God says it to Isaac in a time of famine. And God says it to Jacob, an old man leaving everything familiar to go down to Egypt, the first exile: Do not be afraid to go down to Egypt… I will go down with you. Joshua hears it before he leads a people into an unknown land. Isaiah hears it too: do not fear, for I am with you.

What strikes me is who the phrase is spoken to. Nobody says “do not be afraid” to people who aren’t afraid. It is spoken to the frightened, the grieving, the people standing at the edge of something enormous. And it almost never comes alone. It arrives with a reason: I am with you. It isn’t a command to feel nothing. It is a promise that we do not walk alone.

That promise, spoken to Jacob on the road out of the land, is the one I keep returning to as a Jew who lives far from Israel.

The strange thing about October 7th is how close it felt to those of us thousands of miles away. We were not at the Nova festival or in the kibbutzim. We could not hear the sirens. And yet something in us knew, immediately and physically, that this had happened to us. People who had never lived in Israel, and some who had visited only once, found themselves unable to eat, sleep, or look at their children without a catch in the throat.

That is the strange, stubborn architecture of Jewish peoplehood. Three times a day we pray facing Jerusalem. We end our Passover seders with “next year in Jerusalem.” We break a glass at weddings to remember what was destroyed, even at our happiest. Psalm 137 puts it plainly: If I forget you, Jerusalem… We never taught our children to forget. We built a people whose memory is geographic, whose sorrow and longing point toward a place many of us stand outside of.

So when the grief came, it came through a channel that had been open for two thousand years. A grandmother in Los Angeles who once lit candles in a Polish town felt it. A twelve-year-old in a Hebrew school class felt it. Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh, all of Israel are responsible for one another, stopped being a slogan and became a bodily fact.

I want to be careful here. I lost my parents fifteen and thirteen years ago, and I don’t set that beside what happened on October 7th. Murder, captivity, and the destruction of entire communities are a different order of loss, and grief for it is braided with horror in a way mine never was. I mention my parents only because time has taught me one small thing: grief doesn’t fade on a schedule. It changes shape, and sometimes it returns stronger years later. I can’t speak for those who lost someone that day. I can only speak as one Jew, far away, trying to carry something that was not mine alone to carry.

For many of us, October 7th is harder to hold than ordinary grief because it never fully became grief. It is mourning tangled up with trauma, with images we can’t unsee, with fear that didn’t end when the news cycle moved on. That doesn’t resolve on a timeline either. It lives in the pause before a family simchah, in the way a diaspora Jew now glances at the exits of a synagogue, in conversations we used to have easily that now take a breath before they begin. Distance has not diminished it. It has made it quieter and more particular, because there is no single grave to visit and no single place to put it down.

There are two ways to get this wrong.

The first is to let fear run the house. A people that lives only in mourning and alarm slowly forgets what it is mourning for. We are not only a people who were attacked. We are a people who dance with the Torah, who build, argue, marry, and name babies.

The second is to hurry past the grief, to treat “moving forward” as permission to stop feeling. That betrays the dead, the hostages and the families who waited for them, and everyone who cannot move on and should not be asked to do it for our comfort. Nobody who has grieved is helped by being told it’s time to move on.

Our tradition holds both. Rebbe Nachman taught that the whole world is a very narrow bridge, and that the essential thing is not to be afraid. Notice that he doesn’t say the bridge isn’t narrow. He says to cross it anyway.

That is what al tira means to me now. It does not say the danger is imaginary. It says fear does not get the last word. And the words that come with it, I am with you, are also words about us. Jacob went down to Egypt with his whole family beside him. We are not alone on the bridge, not from Los Angeles to Tel Aviv, and not across the generations. Israel’s pain is ours, and our presence is a comfort to Israel. That is what it means to be one people.

Practically, I think that looks like a few things. It means saying the names, telling the stories, and letting sorrow be sorrow. It means showing up, at the synagogue, at the Shabbat table, in the public square, and in support of Israel’s people, because showing up is the answer to being afraid. And it means teaching our children that we are both a people who remember and a people who rejoice.

Only days before the anniversary, we sat in the sukkah, a fragile hut with a leaky roof, and were commanded to be happy. I used to find that command strange. Now I understand it. You can only choose joy if you know how fragile everything is, and you can only walk without fear if you’ve been told you’re not walking alone.

So tomorrow I’ll light a candle and say their names. I’ll face east, as my ancestors did. Then I’ll go home, sit at a table with the people I love, and go on. Not fearless, but unafraid in the way the Torah means it: grieving, accompanied, and moving forward.

Al tira. Not because there’s nothing to fear, but because we are not alone.