The Longest Day

The day we found the bodies of the six hostages murdered by Hamas was still 7 October. It wasn’t just the disbelief, the numbness and the sense of overwhelming pain. Until every hostage returns home safely, it will remain an extension of that terrible day. How do we begin to understand the reality of existing in a never-ending day of suffering, where there is no clear direction for how we will get to a better tomorrow?

Micha Goodman writes that on 7 October, the State of Israel ceased to exist, and a new generation of ‘founders’ started to rebuild it from the wreckage, literally re-establishing a new State of Israel (The Eighth Day, pp.15-16). So much of Israel was destroyed on that terrible day – infinite lives, communities, buildings, agriculture, as well as the conceptions we held about our enemies, ourselves, our leaders, our security and our place in the world. And despite it being almost a year on, many of those things, whether physical or conceptual, remain in a fragile state of paralysis. It takes a day to destroy, but much more time to rebuild.

As we approach the poignant month of Elul and the lead-up to Yom Kippur, we start a period of reviewing and renewing, ultimately rebuilding our lives and asking God to wipe our collective slate clean. The Midrash and Rashi both explain that Moshe ascended Mount Sinai on 1 Elul to write the second set of tablets of stone. This day is the mid-point between two key moments of the Jewish people’s time in the desert: 17 Tammuz, when the people worshipped the Golden Calf and Moshe smashed the tablets, and 10 Tishrei, Yom Kippur, when God forgave the people and Moshe brought down the second set of tablets. Rashi explains that Moshe spent all these 80 days with God at the summit of Mount Sinai apart from the last day of Av and the first day of Elul, on which he re-ascended the mountain.

For the Children of Israel, the days in between must have felt like one, long, excruciating day. Will God forgive them? Where is their leader? Where do they go from here? Still reeling from the aftermath of the Golden Calf, a time of Divine punishment and civil war, the people were left with the same questions as before. Where is their leader? Where do they go from here? How will we survive in the desert?

Looking back with the perspective of time, we can see that 1 Elul was a critical day in resolving this tragic episode. On this day, God taught Moshe the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy, Moshe prayed for God’s forgiveness, and God wrote a new covenant for the people. But from the people’s perspective, all they saw was Moshe coming down the mountain, carving some stone and returning to the summit. We can hear the people turning to one another and feverishly asking: What was Moshe carving? Where do we go from here?

And what of us? We spent the last days of the difficult month of Av watching families dig into the ground to bury six innocent and beautiful souls. This tragic sight could seem at first glance to be one of hopelessness. After 11 months of waiting, praying, advocating and pleading, the hope of their return was cruelly and brutally extinguished. Where do we go from here?

The eloquent and deeply moving words of Rachel Goldberg-Polin, spoken at her son Hersh’s funeral, can be one response.

“Now, my Hersh I ask for your help. As we transform our hope into grief and this new unknown brand of pain, I beg of you, please do what you can to have your light shine down on me, Dada, Leebie and Orly. Help shower us with healing and resilience. Help us to rise again. I know it will take a long time, but please may G-d bless us that one day, one fine day, Dada, Leebie, Orly and I will hear laughter, and we will turn around and see… that it’s us. And that we are ok. You will always be with us as a force of love and vitality, you will become our superpower.”

Like Moshe, whose face shone with light as he descended Mount Sinai, Rachel asked Hersh to be a light, to help them heal and to rise again. And we need him, and the other holy souls, to do the same for the entire Jewish people.

According to the Midrash, Moshe’s ascent on 1 Elul was accompanied by the sound of the shofar. Its visceral sound, combining the earthy and heavenly together, is blown in two modes: The long, rising blast of the Tekia interspersed with the staccato blasts of the Teruah. The shofar allows us to cry for what is broken whilst resolutely standing firm and rising up.

If the people felt helpless not knowing what would become of Moshe, once again leaving them to climb the mountain, the sound of the shofar was their response – and it can be ours too. The shofar will not magically take away our pain; rather, it will help us channel it and give us direction. We may not suddenly experience unity or salvation, but we can draw strength knowing that in the past, and hopefully today also, it is a day when the tables turn in our favour, even if we are none the wiser.

But this requires action. Moshe did not merely carve the stone. He wrote the Ten Commandments and enshrined a new covenant between God and the people. We too must write a new covenant and rebuild our broken State of Israel. From the blood-soaked ground, we must carve out new shared principles of mutual dependency, humble and trustworthy leadership, and an inbuilt, unshakeable love of our fellow Jews, whatever beliefs they hold or tribes they come from.

With deep pain and unrelenting hope, we will sound the shofar that will eventually herald the end of this long and terrible day. As we approach the High Holy Days, we ask God to shower us with healing and resilience. And to help us rise again.