For this, the world was created

Only a few days ago, we celebrated the Jewish new year, the creation of the world. Today, with sirens still blaring across the country, we grieve over a thousand worlds we lost, and the world we thought we knew until 365 days ago.

It is narrated in the Talmud that upon a person’s death, the Creator asks — have you enjoyed the world I created for you?

Israelis, I have discovered, know so well how to enjoy the beauty of this world. Awe for nature and all that inhabits it is one of the driving factors in the cultural rite of passage of the “big trip”, a highly anticipated post-army trek canvassing countries of the East, the West, or popularly the Global South.

At home in Israel, they like to dip in streams and springs, lay awake in the desert to get a glimpse of the stars, climb to the summit of every mountain, hike from one end of the country to the other, visit the poppies in full bloom. They love music, all sorts of music, and mostly about love- from Eden Hason to Shlomo Artzi and everything in between. They love to volunteer, whether with disadvantaged children, the disabled, the elderly or struggling farmers, locally and intercontinentally. They love their Jewish heritage, loud Passover Seders and brightly hung Sukkahs, weekly Friday night kiddush at dinners with family and slichot at the Kotel that attracts tens of thousands yearly, empty streets on Yom Kippur and full services for Kol Nidrei. They deeply, selflessly love their people, so much so that in Israel, “I would give my life for you” is anything but an empty sweet nothing. It’s a societal reality, a sentiment shared more commonly than not, embodied in rifles slung over the shoulders of the green shirts worn by young people dreaming of their awaited big trip, or to return to their studies and catch up, or to hug their children, unpack their trauma with a psychologist, finally spend a weekend with their spouse, save fragments of a collapsing business. “If I forget you Jerusalem may I forget my right hand” is not mere poetry but a promise. Every aspect of their lives on hold and often on the line, for all that they are so in love with.

They are so easy to love.

When Jews suffer, we draw strength and wisdom from the resilience of previous generations. We are reassured of our continued survival and of the fortitude that lives on in us.

This Talmudic tradition offered me a tiny ray of solace as I read up on the lives of victims of the Nova festival. Many of them had gone on their “big trip”, illustrated by smiling photos in front of crystal clear waters or major landmarks. I could almost imagine them beaming with the familiar Israeli enthusiasm as they respond excitedly, describing every sunset and waterfall, every flower they picked or wave they rode. Yes, they enjoyed the beautiful world created for them.

For them — the world was created.

For each one of us individually, the Talmud teaches, the world was created. To all of us collectively it has been entrusted, the world created in 6 days. The seventh was dedicated to rest, to God’s love for His creations and His covenant with the Jewish people. But light of creation was hidden away, dedicated only to the righteous. This light initiated order from chaos, the warmth of loving-kindness from a frigid abyss of nothingness. Repeatedly, the Jewish people are called on to fight the darkness, to ensure that glimmers of divine light remain to illuminate the world. Amalek, the ancient enemy of our Israelite ancestors was viewed as the ultimate embodiment of this darkness, a cruel tribe of bandits who preyed on the weak, attacking the back of the camp of a wandering refugee nation where the elderly, sick, disabled, and young families often fell behind.

We have been reminded in the past year of the worst of humanity, of this very same darkness. Breaking into homes of sleeping families and elderly couples at the crack of dawn, on the Sabbath and the most joyous holiday of the Jewish calendar, stealing their phones to gleefully livestream their suffering- for some their final moments seen alive, to friends and family. Storming a music festival at its zenith, full of unarmed, sleepless, and many incapacitated young people to torture and murder in front of their loved ones. Shooting children in front of their parents and parents in front of their little children. Looking party-goers in the eyes as they plead for their lives on their knees before murdering them point blank. Calling up numbers posted by desperate parents worried sick about their daughters to taunt them. Posing for photos stepping on the living and the dead, waving AK-47s with maniacal grins. Taking little children, even a 9 month old baby, captive in subhuman conditions. Playing depraved psychological games, like their familiar trivia videos — of these hostages, which are alive or dead or wounded?- you’ll have to wait for tomorrow for the reveal.

And the mobs, the masses in Gaza waiting for bloodthirsty sons and brothers to bring back spoils, clamoring to hit, to throw stones and jeer at barely-conscious Israeli women huddled with their children in pajamas, abused corpses of ambushed fallen soldiers, frail Holocaust survivors paraded through the streets. To beat an elderly man in his boxers already thrown to the ground, limp. To spit and laugh at the lifeless body of a young woman stripped to her underwear. It is no surprise that the heirs of the perpetrators of the 1929 Hebron massacre, the 1834 Safed massacre, with a legacy of suicide bombings in pizza shops, bus stations and ice cream stores, a society that still takes pride in the “humiliation” of nonbelievers and particularly the Yahud, would gladly perpetrate a pogrom. That a population in which a man who sticks out his bloody hands in celebration of having torn two Israeli men to pieces is lauded as a celebrity if not a hero, could be capable of such bloodlust. But we have become so used to a world in which the worst of humanity is kept at bay, where Jew-killers are stopped in their tracks before committing evils of mass proportions. Civilization in the form of the Israeli state had supposedly overpowered the state of nature, the age-old vitriolic violence perpetually inflicted on the Jewish people.

That symbolic man with the bloody hands, pictured in the 2000 Ramallah lynching standing above cheering crowds waving dismembered organs of murdered Jews, is finally dead, following the October 7th pogrom and the long war that has followed. This was not the first pogrom in Jewish history, but it was the first pogrom in Jewish history in which Jewish soldiers rescued Jews from burning homes, in which a Jewish army rained down fire on its perpetrators.

101 hostages mark one year in captivity, deprived of the beauty of the world and everything they love, ripped from the music of a nature party, from the warm embrace of their families or from the security of an army base in peacetime. An entire country awaits their return from the depths of the darkness, to cry the tears of joy we couldn’t stop when Noa, Almog, Farhan, Fernando, Andrei, Shlomi, Louis, and Ori were rescued by our soldiers or when dozens of women and children were returned in a difficult negotiation in November that provided us with some glimmers of light.

To many Jews around the globe, the world post-October 7th has turned dark. Antisemitism is emboldened and on the rise, we have lost so much and it seems that all has plunged into chaos. Once again, we are forced to protect the light of creation, to fight the darkness, maintain law and order and exemplify loving-kindness.

Near and far, the people of Israel and the Jewish nation everywhere have risen to that challenge. More than ever, Israeli society and the Jewish people have come together to mourn, to comfort, to scream the cries of the helpless to the heavens or to the parliament, to volunteer, to rebuild, to fight the enemy. Through constant air raid sirens and uncertainty, Israelis continue to sanctify life, to pray and mourn and celebrate and love each other.

A night before the recent Iranian attack, my family attended a Ishay Ribo concert. I’d been to his concerts before, and this was not the first in which emotion overwhelmed me. But I felt tears on my face as a new understanding struck me, looking out over crowds of Jews of all types of backgrounds from anywhere. As the arena lit up in shades of blue and purple, engulfed in the melody of love songs to God composed by the singer, in the familiar tradition of King David with a more modern twist, I saw teens hugging one another, families swaying together, a group of friends holding up a banner featuring their friend who fell in battle. I reflected on the last Ishay Ribo concert I attended a year before, October 5th of 2023, how the way we all experience the world will never be the same again. Prayers of the High Holidays referenced in the songs allude to our collective hope, the eternal Jewish hope for peace, for light, for the defeat of the darkness. A hope that has become our national anthem and our religious anthem expressed in three prayers daily. A hope that is no longer passively yearned for, but pursued bravely, lovingly, passionately with an ever-broken heart.

For this, the world was created.