October 7th; How it’s Logically Impossible for Terrorism to Ever Win

October 7^th was about sending a message that Jews could be hunted down in their homes so that we would become so afraid, we would stop believing in our right to live here.

But that’s exactly why they will never win, as our enemies fundamentally misunderstand who they are fighting against. They can kill a person, but they cannot kill an idea. They can murder a mother or a father, but they cannot erase the generations that came before them or the generations that come after them.

Terrorism is built on fear. But look around us. We are here happily building homes, having children, going to school, going to shul, celebrating Shabbat, dancing at weddings, going to comedy shows, celebrating birthdays and arguing about politics (like what we say actually matters). We didn’t run away from Israel. In fact, the opposite happens every time our enemies try to destroy us, as our enemies measure success by how much destruction they create, and we measure success by how much life we create. In the Israeli mortgage market, we are calling it “The October 7^th Effect” (and we are loving the extra business).

From Eilat to Kiryat Shmona, October 7^th has fundamentally changed Israel’s core. There are wounds that will never fully heal, and there are people we lost whose absence will be felt for the rest of our lives. But there is a massive difference between hurting us and defeating us.

You cannot terrorize a nation who have already spent thousands of years learning how to survive persecution, exile, pogroms, the Holocaust and countless genocidal attacks. It’s not in our DNA to ever give up. For proof of this, ask any Israeli whether post October 7^th, if the right thing to do is to leave Israel or rebuild this country and make it stronger.

You can destroy what we have already built but you cannot stop us from building again tomorrow. And so, we remember October 7 not only as the day we were attacked, but as a chapter in a much longer story. A story that has been written so many times before.

They tried to destroy us. We survived. They tried to make us afraid. We continued. They tried to erase us. We rebuilt. And they will eventually learn what every generation before them eventually learned: our enemies can (and do) cause incredible pain, but just like every other enemy, they will soon be in our rearview mirror.

October 7, 2023.

Because we can’t ever forget, we therefore never stop living and never stop dancing.