The Pogrom and the Fragile Covenant

October 7 as moral collapse, ancient continuity, and fragile futurity.

There are moments when history stops breathing. October 7 was such a moment – not only for Israel, but for anyone who still believes that moral boundaries are real, that there exists a line no human being should cross. The massacre that unfolded that morning was not a war crime, nor merely a terrorist attack. It was a pogrom in the most ancient and literal sense: the sudden eruption of hatred that seeks not victory but annihilation.

For many Jews, it was as if time collapsed. Centuries of exile, slaughter, and accusation converged in a single instant. The images were unspeakable, and yet they said everything – about the fragility of civilization, the weakness of moral speech, and the blindness that had long been cultivated under the cover of political routine and psychological fatigue. Israel’s enemies may have believed they were striking a powerful state, but what they struck was something far older and infinitely more delicate: the sukkah of a people still living under divine exposure, still holding on to a promise that the world seems determined to break.

The Continuum of Assassination

The process of assassinating the Jews did not begin on October 7. It never really stopped. It mutates, adapts, hides behind new languages – nationalism, liberation, decolonization – but its inner logic remains constant. Thus, it is older than politics, older even than religion: the recurrent human impulse to destroy the witness of covenantal conscience.

In every century, the same drama unfolds. The Jew becomes the screen upon which societies project their own guilt, contradictions, and failures. When the moral order decays, when responsibility becomes unbearable, the temptation to erase the bearer of memory returns. October 7 was not an aberration of modernity; it was its revelation. The unmasked face of hatred was not a barbaric regression but an exposure of what modern nihilism has always contained within itself: the hatred of moral difference, of limits, of the voice that says “Thou shalt not kill.”

This is why the Jewish people, even when armed and sovereign, remain vulnerable. Israel’s strength has never guaranteed its safety. Its weapons cannot shield it from the metaphysical hostility that seeks not to conquer, but to erase. The world’s reaction – the quick relativization, the sudden amnesia, the moral fog – proved once again that indifference is not the absence of evil but its final triumph.

Moral Collapse and the Loss of Witness

In the months that followed, the shock gave way to a deeper dread: not that the massacre had occurred, but that the world had learned nothing from it. The ritual condemnation faded. The survivors were left to justify their own survival. Universities, cultural elites, and moral commentators resumed their accustomed posture – balancing atrocities as if moral equivalence were the highest form of wisdom.

This indifference is not new. It is the continuation of an older pattern – what the rabbis called sin’at ḥinam/שינת חינם, causeless hatred. Hatred that does not respond to any particular act, but to existence itself. To be a Jew, in this sense, has always meant to embody a scandal: the scandal of persistence, of covenantal memory, of a moral law that refuses to vanish.

But the moral collapse revealed by October 7 extends beyond the Jewish condition. It exposes a wider spiritual vacancy. The failure is not only political or diplomatic. It is anthropological. Humanity, having replaced moral order with technological omnipotence and the cult of spontaneity, now faces a world where outrage itself has no moral core – where everything can be said, and nothing truly matters.

The pogrom thus becomes a mirror. It reflects not only hatred toward Jews, but the erosion of conscience within all societies that once drew moral strength from the Jewish witness. When Israel is desecrated, the very grammar of ethics trembles.

Fragility as Vocation

Yet – within the unbearable darkness – something else begins to appear. The fragility of Israel, like the sukkah/סוכה trembling in the wind, is not merely a weakness. It is a form of calling. The covenant was never a contract of protection; it was a vocation to endure exposure. The Jewish condition, as the prophets knew, is not to dominate history but to remain in it as witness – even when the witness is rejected, mocked, or slaughtered.

October 7 tore away illusions. It revealed how precarious all human security is, and how easily faith, solidarity, and reason collapse under the pressure of fear and ideology. But it also forced a question: What can still be grafted from this devastation?

The Grafting Process

In earlier writings, I reflected on the grafting process – that strange biblical and historical phenomenon by which life continues not by purity but by attachment, by being joined to something living beyond itself. Israel itself was born of grafting: Abraham called from among idolaters, Ruth from Moab, a people reassembled after exile and ruin. The covenant has never been static: it grows through wounds, through the incorporation of the unexpected.

October 7, in its horror, shattered many of the illusions of modern Israel – illusions of normalcy, of control, of separation from the wider human story. Yet, in that shattering, something invisible may already be taking root. The grafting continues – not as theological triumphalism, but as the slow reattachment of moral tissue. The future, if it exists, will depend on the capacity to re-root moral life in the consciousness of fragility, not in the arrogance of power and in this particular region of the globe, beyond centuries.

The pogrom reopens an ancient wound, but also an ancient possibility: that from within death, life might still be joined to life. That even a people marked by destruction can offer the world a renewed understanding of what it means to persist – not through revenge, not through erasure, but through the reweaving of meaning itself.

The Faith War

We are living in a profoundly faith-based war – not only between armies, but between meta-historical values that cannot be reduced to rational calculation. The conflict is not merely territorial. It is existential, fought over the meaning of humanity, of limits, of holiness and desecration. This is why the rhetoric of reason and diplomacy sounds hollow: the context is unique because what is unfolding transcends the political. It is a struggle between those who still believe in moral transcendence and those who deny that such a horizon exists at all. And all compete to take a lead that does not depend on the humans only.

October 7 revealed the front line of this faith war – the fracture between memory and oblivion, between covenant and chaos. The next reflection, perhaps on Tishri 22, will need to explore this dimension further: not the mourning of destruction, but the question of what it means to rejoice in the midst of darkness, to celebrate Simḥat Torah when the scroll itself seems burned.

A Future Beyond Calculation

What happened on that day cannot be understood within the logic of history alone. It belongs to a different order – what the philosophers might call an event, the theologians a trial, the survivors simply a khurbn/חורבן – destruction. Each generation must translate it anew. Yet beyond all interpretations, one truth remains: the fragility of the covenant is not its failure, but its condition of existence.

To live under the covenant is to inhabit exposure, to accept that faith does not prevent catastrophe, that moral life does not shield one from cruelty. It is to know that human beings, left to their own devices, can desecrate even the most sacred. And yet, it is also to affirm – stubbornly, absurdly, faithfully – that life can still be grafted onto life, that even out of destruction, the sap of meaning can rise again.

The assassins of the Jews have always believed they were ending something. What they never understood is that each attempt only deepens the mystery of survival. The covenant endures not because it is strong, but because it remains open — wounded, fragile, and yet alive.

After the Pogrom

The task now is not to seek revenge, nor to romanticize suffering, but to recover moral speech – to name things again, truthfully, without cynicism or fear. To rebuild the covenant of language itself. In this sense, the true response to the pogrom is neither vengeance nor despair, but renewed avodah/עבודה, service (work and prayer): the re-sanctification of ordinary life, the daily choice to preserve meaning against the void.

Israel remains a sukkah – provisional, transparent, trembling. But perhaps this is precisely where its strength lies. The pogrom sought to destroy the covenantal heart of humanity. It failed. And though the covenant remains fragile, it is precisely through that fragility that the possibility of the future passes – not as certainty, but as grace.

Jerusalem, Tishri 5786 / October 2025