The October 8 Jew I Became

There are days that divide a life into before and after.

The birth of a child. A marriage. A death. A diagnosis. We all have dates that become markers, moments after which we are somehow no longer quite the same person.

October 7, 2023 is one of mine.

Three years later, I find myself thinking less about everything that has happened since that day and more about what those three years have done to me.

They changed me as a Jew. As an American. As a mother. As a friend. They changed how I think about politics and ideology, how I understand courage, and how I judge the difference between the values people say they hold and the values they are actually willing to defend.

And the date itself carries a meaning for me today that I could not have understood three years ago.

October 7 did not simply fall during the Jewish holiday season. The attack came on Shabbat and on Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah in Israel, one of the most joyous days of the Jewish calendar. It came as Jews were completing the annual cycle of reading the Torah and preparing to begin again.

As I have written before, I did not grow up knowing much about Jewish religious tradition. In the Soviet Union, being Jewish was an identity, and one that carried consequences, but religion was suppressed. I did not grow up studying Torah or understanding the Jewish calendar. I barely knew what many of our holidays were, much less what they meant.

That has been one of the unexpected changes in me since October 7.

I started learning.

And the more I learned, the more deeply I was affected by traditions that had existed for thousands of years but were largely new to me.

That feels particularly meaningful as we emerge from this year’s Jewish holiday season.

Rosh Hashanah asks us to consider renewal, what we carry forward and what we want to change. Yom Kippur demands something harder: an accounting of ourselves. Atonement. Forgiveness. Teshuvah, the possibility of returning and changing course.

One idea has stayed with me in particular: cheshbon hanefesh, an accounting of the soul.

Where did I fall short? Whom did I hurt? What did I get wrong? What am I willing to change?

Then comes Simchat Torah.

We finish the Torah and immediately begin again.

Bereishit.

In the beginning.

I find something extraordinary in that now.

We don’t finish the story and put the book away. We return to the beginning and read it again, presumably a little differently because another year of living has changed us.

And what stories we return to.

Creation. Adam and Eve. Cain and Abel. Noah and the flood. The Tower of Babel. Abraham leaving everything familiar behind.

They are stories about creation and destruction, jealousy and murder, ambition and responsibility, faith and doubt, family and exile. They are stories about deeply imperfect human beings continually confronting choices about who they are and who they want to become.

Three years ago, I did not understand the significance of the holiday on which October 7 occurred.

Today, I cannot separate them.

Because October 7 also became a beginning for me, although certainly not one I would ever have chosen.

It began three years of questioning.

I have lost friends.

I have been profoundly disappointed by people I respected. I have also been surprised by people who showed extraordinary kindness and moral courage, including people who disagreed with me.

And that distinction matters.

The dividing line was rarely whether someone agreed with me about Israel.

It was whether they were willing to question, to learn, and to tolerate complexity.

October 7 showed me how easily affiliation can substitute for knowledge. How quickly incredibly complicated histories and ideas can be reduced to vocabulary tests.

Genocide. Colonialism. Occupation. Apartheid. Resistance. Zionist. Western values. Capitalism.

These are not small words or simple concepts. They carry history, definitions and enormous moral weight. Yet I watched them become labels to be embraced or rejected with astonishing certainty, sometimes by people who had spent remarkably little time understanding what they actually meant.

We live in a time when information has never been easier to access, yet curiosity sometimes seems increasingly difficult to find.

Too often, we choose a side first and then acquire the facts that belong to it.

I began noticing not only which facts people believed, but which ones they were willing to question. Figures from the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza were repeated with confidence, often within hours, with little interest in who was producing them or how. When Israelis, or anyone else, raised questions about those numbers, the questions themselves were treated as suspect, even as a form of denial. International institutions and major newspapers were invoked as proof, with little curiosity about the sources underneath their conclusions. Yet in another context, those same people would insist, correctly, that sources, incentives and methodology matter.

Every source deserves scrutiny. What troubled me was scrutiny that ran in only one direction.

Context cannot be something we demand only when it supports the conclusion we already prefer.

And then I began noticing something broader. At protest after protest, I saw many of the same people, the same slogans and remarkably often the same conclusions. One day the cause was Israel. The next it was another anti-Western cause. The day after that it was capitalism, corporations or data centers. Different subjects, different histories, different facts.

Everything could be organized into a familiar framework: oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, capitalist and worker, the West and those it had harmed.

Those frameworks can sometimes illuminate something real. But when the framework determines the answer before we have learned the facts, it stops being analysis and becomes ideology.

And once facts are chosen to fit a side, principles become remarkably flexible.

I watched people who had spent years telling us to believe women suddenly struggle to make room for Israeli women when accounts of sexual violence did not fit comfortably into their political narrative.

I watched people who speak constantly about democracy and human rights become curiously selective about which democracies deserve defending and whose human rights warrant outrage.

I watched people who insist that language matters throw around some of the most consequential words in our vocabulary as though definitions were optional.

And perhaps most painfully, I watched empathy become conditional.

Jewish pain, in particular, often seemed to require justification.

In the framework so many people had already adopted, Jews had been sorted in advance. White. Privileged. Powerful. On the wrong side of the line between oppressor and oppressed.

My family came to this country as refugees. We did not bring privilege with us. We brought what we could carry.

And my story is hardly unusual.

Jews from Yemen and Iraq. From Morocco, Iran and Ethiopia. From Belarus, Ukraine and India. Families who fled or were expelled from Arab countries. Families who survived the Holocaust, and families whose ancestors never set foot in Europe at all.

We do not look alike. We do not share a single history. What we share is a people, a tradition and, far too often, the experience of being forced to leave.

Some Jews are white. Some are wealthy. Of course they are.

But reducing Jews to “rich and white” is not analysis. It is precisely the kind of erasure many of the same people would recognize instantly if it were done to anyone else.

And it made Jewish grief remarkably easy to dismiss.

October 7 also forced me to reconsider my own political affiliations.

For much of my adult life, I believed certain values transcended politics: democracy, women’s rights, individual freedom, minority rights, freedom of expression, opposition to religious fundamentalism and authoritarianism.

I still believe those things.

What I am less certain about is whether the political affiliations we choose consistently reflect them.

I still struggle with the contradictions.

How can women’s rights be non-negotiable until the women are Israeli?

How can religious fundamentalism be condemned in one context and romanticized as resistance in another?

How can democracy be described as existential while profoundly illiberal ideas become tolerable when they come from someone useful to our political coalition?

And increasingly, I am not sure I want to organize my beliefs around a political team at all.

This is not an argument that virtue resides in one political party and hypocrisy in another.

It is an argument about consistency.

If a principle applies only when it is politically convenient, perhaps it was never really a principle.

But it would be very easy to stop there.

Here is what everyone else got wrong.

Here is who disappointed me.

Here is who failed the moral test.

And that would miss perhaps the most important thing I have learned from the Jewish traditions I have spent these years discovering.

Cheshbon hanefesh is not an accounting of everyone else’s soul.

It is an accounting of mine.

So if I am going to criticize others for allowing affiliation to replace thought, I have to ask whether I have ever done the same.

Have I listened as carefully as I expect others to listen?

Have I allowed anger to make me less curious?

Have I dismissed someone because of a label before understanding what that person actually believes?

Have I made enough room for Palestinian suffering while carrying the grief and fear I feel for Israelis and Jews?

Have I sometimes wanted to win the argument more than I wanted to understand the person?

Have I been as willing to question the people on my side as I expect others to question theirs?

Those questions are harder.

They are also necessary.

Because surely the lesson of the last three years cannot be that tribal thinking is dangerous only when the other tribe does it.

Perhaps the deepest change has been as a mother.

I think differently now about what I want my children to inherit from me.

Jewish identity, certainly. But not a Jewish identity built only around persecution, antisemitism and fear.

I want them to inherit what I am only now learning to appreciate more deeply in Judaism: its joy, argument, learning, humor, tradition, resilience, responsibility and insistence on questioning.

I used to think my responsibility was to give my children enough confidence in who they were that they would never feel the need to hide it.

Now I think I owe them something more difficult: the ability to think for themselves when belonging asks them not to.

I want them to know where they come from. And I want them to understand the country that gave their mother a home.

I grew up in Minsk, in the Soviet Union, and arrived in America as a 17-year-old refugee. I know what it means to come from a system where speech, religion and opportunity were constrained.

America gave my family freedom. It gave me the ability to build a life that would have been almost unimaginable to the girl who left Minsk.

That does not mean America is perfect. Of course it isn’t.

But gratitude and criticism can coexist. Love of country does not require blindness to its failures any more than love of Israel requires agreement with every Israeli government.

Maybe that is another thing October 7 clarified for me: the importance of being able to hold more than one truth at the same time.

Israel can be imperfect and still have the right to exist.

Palestinians can suffer terribly without October 7 becoming justified.

A government can deserve criticism without its citizens deserving hatred.

America can have profound flaws and still be an extraordinary experiment in freedom.

A friend can disagree with me without becoming my enemy.

And my own side can be wrong.

That last one may be the hardest.

I want my children to understand that courage is not choosing the popular side.

It is not choosing the unpopular side either.

Courage is refusing to outsource your conscience to your side.

Read.

Ask questions.

Change your mind when the facts require it.

Say “I don’t know” when you don’t know.

Hold your own people accountable without abandoning them.

Recognize someone else’s humanity without believing that doing so requires surrendering your own.

And when something is wrong, say so, even when the people around you would prefer your silence.

Three years ago, October 7 shattered many things I thought I understood.

About friendship. About politics. About institutions. About the durability of principles.

But I don’t want the defining lesson of October 7 to be disappointment.

That gives too much power to the people who disappointed me.

The more important question, three years later, is what I choose to do with what I learned.

I have lost some friendships and strengthened others. I have become less attached to political labels and more attached to principles. I have become more skeptical of certainty and more appreciative of curiosity. I have become less willing to stay silent simply to remain welcome in a room.

And October 7 made me curious about a part of myself I had never really understood.

I began learning traditions I had never been taught. I began asking questions I had never thought to ask. I discovered meaning in holidays that once would have passed almost unnoticed.

Now I understand something beautiful about ending the Torah and immediately beginning it again.

We don’t erase what came before. We carry it with us, roll the scroll back, and begin again.

Bereishit.

Three years later, I am not the person I was on October 6, 2023. I don’t think I ever will be.

Perhaps that is what this anniversary asks of me too. Not to forget what was lost, or what these three years revealed, but to decide what I will do with what I now know.

And begin again.