October 7th is still happening

I’m sitting here on the floor in my little sun-well of a kitchen, listening to Leonard Cohen’s “Who by Fire.”

And I remember:

On October 6, 2023 — the end of the old timeline — I watched the movie, Golda.

I remember being struck by how catastrophic the Yom Kippur War was — the intelligence failures, the arrogance, the terrible price ordinary people paid because the people responsible for keeping them safe were so catastrophically unprepared.

And I remember thinking: Thank God that could never happen again.

Our leaders could never be that unprepared again.

The movie ends with a long shot of dead birds lying on the floor.

And Leonard Cohen singing “Who by Fire.”

I remember sitting on my couch and bawling.

Less than 24 hours later, the sirens began.

At first, that part wasn’t totally unfathomable.

Rockets are something we know.

They are part of the weather here.

There is winter. There is summer. There is rocket season.

You hear the siren. You grab the kids. You go where you’re supposed to go. You wait. You listen for the boom. You check the news. You text the people you love.

But then came the footage.

The hideous white trucks.

The terrorists.

At first, I thought it was a handful of gunmen who had somehow gotten through.

I didn’t understand the scale of it.

I don’t think any of us did.

And then the numbers began climbing.

And climbing.

And the stories started coming.

Kibbutz after kibbutz. The Nova festival. Families hiding in safe rooms. Parents trying to keep their children silent. People calling their mothers. People calling the police. People calling anyone who might come.

People who never came home.

It took days for me to begin to understand what had happened.

Three years later, I think I am still understanding it.

The Times of Israel has launched the Those We Have Lost project, gathering the names and faces and stories of the people murdered on October 7 and in the war that followed.

And looking through it is overwhelming.

Because a number is terrible.

But a face is different.

A face had a favorite song.

A face had a stupid joke they told too often.

A face had someone they texted when they got home safely.

A face had coffee the way they liked it, and people who knew exactly how they took it.

A face was expected somewhere.

And now there are so many faces.

So I sit on the floor and weep.

I sit on the floor because I don’t know where else to put my body.

I sit on the floor because grief is not an idea. It is physical, has weight and it pulls you down.

I sit on the floor and listen to Leonard Cohen sing about who by fire, who by water, who in the sunshine.

I sit on the floor and think about how many people have been forced to learn the exact shape of an empty chair.

How many people are carrying the last message, the last photograph, the last ordinary morning.

And I remember something else from those first days, too.

I remember the messages.

They came from everywhere.

Friends in America and Europe. Friends I hadn’t spoken to in years. People who weren’t Jewish. People who weren’t Israeli. People who didn’t necessarily understand this country or agree with its government or know very much about the conflict at all.

They wrote anyway.

Are you safe?

Are your children safe?

I’m thinking of you.

I love you.

What do you need?

For a little while, it felt as though the enormity of what had happened was obvious enough that nothing else needed to be explained.

People had been murdered in their homes.

Young people had been slaughtered while dancing.

Children had been kidnapped.

Old people had been dragged across a border.

That was enough.

And then, slowly, something changed.

The war went on.

Gaza was devastated. Palestinian families were killed and displaced. Israeli soldiers were killed. Hostages remained underground. More families joined the terrible fraternity of the bereaved.

And the grief spread outward.

So did the anger.

Three years later, this war has seeped far beyond the borders of Israel and Gaza into into the Jewish world.

Into friendships.

Into universities and workplaces and synagogues.

Into conversations at dinner tables thousands of miles from here.

Into the question of whether someone feels comfortable wearing a Star of David on the subway.

Into the calculation some Jewish parents make before sending their children to school.

Into friendships where people discovered that they were speaking entirely different languages about the same catastrophe.

And into something more intimate than fear. Antisemitism has made the world feel smaller. It has made ordinary Jewish life feel like a series of calculations.

Can I say where I’m from?

Can I wear this necklace?

Can I mention Israel without first explaining every position I hold?

Can I grieve publicly without being told that my grief is evidence of some larger crime?

Can I say that Jews were murdered because they were Jews without having to immediately prove that I also understand every other history of suffering?

I become careful in ways that do not feel like wisdom and I become hard in ways that do not feel like strength.

This is what antisemitism does, even when it is not shouted directly at you.

It teaches you to anticipate contempt.
It teaches you to make yourself less visible.
It teaches you that your safety may depend on being legible to other people as harmless, agreeable, exceptional, assimilated.

It teaches you to separate the parts of yourself that others might find inconvenient.

The Jewish part.The Israeli part.The grieving part. The angry part. The part that still loves this place. The part that knows what this place has done. And I don’t want to live that way.

I don’t want Jew hatred to make me smaller.

I don’t want it to turn me into someone who can only see danger.

I don’t want to harden so completely that I lose the ability to recognize another person’s pain.

I don’t want to become suspicious of every stranger, dismissive of every criticism, incapable of distinguishing between disagreement and hatred.

But I also don’t want to pretend that hatred is not hatred.

I don’t want to explain away the old language when it appears with a pink headband or a ring light or on a concert stage or on a podcast or in a red hand pin at an awards ceremony or in Gracie Mansion.

I don’t want to be told that Jewish fear is an overreaction, that Jewish grief is inconvenient, that Jewish safety is somehow a demand too many.

I don’t want to have to choose between being openhearted and being awake.

I want to be able to mourn Jewish lives without being asked to apologize for mourning them.

I want to be able to mourn Palestinian lives without being accused of betraying my own.

I want to be able to say that antisemitism is real without using that truth as a weapon against anyone else’s humanity.

And somewhere along the way, those first simple messages — Are you safe? I love you. What do you need? — became harder to find beneath everything else.

I don’t want to romanticize those first days. There was nothing beautiful about them. I would give anything for them never to have happened.

But I remember the reaching out.

I remember people recognizing pain before deciding what that pain meant politically.

And I miss that.

I miss the possibility that someone could hear me say, “I am afraid,” and not immediately demand a position paper.

I miss the possibility that grief could remain grief for a little while before being turned into evidence.

Because three years later, I don’t have a grand conclusion.

I don’t have a lesson that makes October 7 make sense.

I don’t have a neat sentence about grief or war or Israelis or Palestinians or what comes next.

Mostly, today, I am sitting on my kitchen floor waiting for the voice from the Whirlwind.

I am sitting on the floor because I am grieving.

I am grieving the people whose faces I have learned.

I am grieving the people whose names I still don’t know.

I am grieving the country I thought I understood.

I am grieving the version of myself who believed that if we remembered enough, learned enough, prepared enough, we could prevent the past from returning.

I am grieving the way the world looked at Jews for a few brief days and then looked away.

I am grieving the way so many people have been asked to become symbols instead of remaining human beings.

Leonard Cohen is singing “Who by Fire.”

And I am remembering the woman I was on October 6, 2023, sitting on another couch, watching another Israeli catastrophe unfold safely in the past.

Thinking:

Thank God we learned. Thank God that could never happen again. Less than 24 hours later, the sirens began.

And maybe that is what I have to say today.

I am afraid of shrinking.

I am afraid of hardening.

I am afraid that if I keep listening to the world explain away Jewish pain, I will eventually stop expecting tenderness from anyone.

But I am still here on the floor.

Still listening.

Still grieving.

Still trying to remain human in a world that keeps asking me to choose between my own safety and someone else’s.

October 7 is three years ago.

October 7 is still happening.

Sarah will  be launching her new book Fairy Lights in God’s Backyard: A Jerusalem Love Story at the Tower of David Jerusalem Museum  on Thursday, October 15 at 6 pm. Tickets available HERE