My October 7th Family

On October 7, 2023, my husband came home from synagogue and said something bad happened in Israel. He said nobody knew any details but the rumors were already spreading like wildfire. Some sort of attack, a pogrom, a massacre.

I have a sister and a brother who live in Israel, one in Givat Zev and the other in Ranana. Of course, my first thought went to them and their families. I frantically told my husband that I needed to turn on my phone and call them to make sure they were okay. He reassured me. “The attack came from the Gaza border. It’s not your family. It’s fine.”

But it wasn’t fine, and it turned out, it was my family. Not my biological siblings, thank God, but a family I never knew existed until 365 days ago, when I suddenly gained thousands of brothers and sisters; young, cool, dancing aunts and smiling elderly grandfathers.

How could I feel such joy when Noa Argamani was reunited with her parents, or such utter heartbreak when Hersh’s body was found? How can the pain of seeing old photographs of the little Bibas boys be physical, a literal ache, for people I have never known?

These twelve months have been difficult in ways that cannot totally be understood by the head. It’s the husbands and brothers and sons going off to war; it’s the blatant hatred towards Jews—not just Israel—that has reared its head after staying mostly dormant for the last 80 years; it’s the fighting between every faction and every section of Jew.

There is a story told which occurred during the destruction of the second Temple. Some Jews wanted to fight the Romans, while others wanted to wait out the siege as best they could. They gathered grain and other food items, enough to last for years. The faction of Jews who wanted to fight the Romans knew they could never convince the other group to join them, so they burned their storehouses, leaving the Jews no choice but to fight. We all know how that story ended—hundreds of years later, we still have not rebuilt our Temple.

I have thought of this story frequently over the last twelve months, as a new enemy lies outside our walls. I don’t know the solution to a problem with no happy ending. I can’t wrap my head around the enormity of these kinds of decisions. But I know that anger is another word for grief, and that rage comes from feeling powerless. When we try to express our feelings to the world, we are at best minimized, and often, vilified, so we lash out at each other, much like children who lash out at their parents or siblings, safe in the knowledge that their love, at least, is unconditional.

So when the storehouses come to my mind, I think of my sister, who goes every week with her children to deliver baked goods to soldiers. I think of my brother, whose community has lost countless young men but has not lost hope. I think of the Goldberg-Polins, exemplifying what it means to be a light unto the nations, and I think about their son Hersh, and Almog, and Ori, and Alexander, who died protecting their Jewish sisters deep underground. I think of the family I never knew I had, but who now never leave my thoughts. My October 7th family. The people of Israel. The Jewish people. They are a piece of me, a tiny sliver I carry eternally, much as I carry my own children in my heart.

I finish with a line from the Book of Eicha that stayed with me this year long after the Tisha Ba’av fast ended, and became my Rosh Hashana prayer: “Return us to You, Hashem, so we may be restored. Renew our days like the days of old. For even if You have rejected us entirely, You have bitterly raged against us.”