Three Years Later: The Weight We Carry, the Resolve We Keep
Three years have passed since the morning of October 7, 2023—a day that fractured our collective reality, tore through thousands of families, and shattered every illusion of complacency. Time moves forward with an indifferent momentum, but for those who lived through the terror, for the families whose loved ones were murdered or held captive, and for an entire people scarred by unspeakable loss, time does not heal on a predictable schedule. The wounds remain raw, and the grief does not fade; it merely takes on a heavier, more permanent form.
In the immediate aftermath of extreme trauma, survival is driven by shock, adrenaline, and urgent mobilization. You do what must be done: you rush to defend, you embrace the broken, you set up operational command posts, you muck through ruin, and you stand side-by-side with neighbors in disbelief. But when the first year turns into the second, and the second into the third, the adrenaline burns off. What remains is the long, grinding haul of endurance.
In military operations and high-stakes service, you learn quickly that real resilience is not proven in the initial clash. It is forged in the long watch afterward—in the quiet hours when the cameras have moved on, the headlines have shifted to other crises, and you are left standing guard in the cold, bearing the weight of your fallen comrades while keeping your eyes locked on the horizon. The danger of year three is not just external threat; it is the insidious creeping of exhaustion, numbness, and the temptation to look away because carrying the burden simply hurts too much.
Yet looking away is a luxury our people have never possessed.
The Hebrew language draws an essential distinction between two words often translated as strength: koach, the burst of physical force required to lift a sudden weight, and gevurah, the disciplined, internal fortitude required to restrain despair, maintain moral clarity, and hold the line over an extended trial. What October 7 demanded of us was koach—the immediate, fierce reaction to survive an onslaught. What these three years demand of us is gevurah—the quiet, unyielding discipline to remember every name, support every traumatized family, stand uncompromisingly against hatred, and rebuild life with deliberate, stubborn purpose.
To mark three years is not to engage in passive mourning. In Jewish tradition, memory (zechirah) is never an exercise in nostalgia; it is an active command. We remember not to remain trapped in the ashes of the past, but to sharpen our responsibility for the living and to steel our resolve for the battles ahead.
We honor the fallen not with hollow platitudes, but by refusing to fracture from within. We honor them by rejecting cynicism, by showing up for one another with ferocious loyalty, and by ensuring that Jewish pride, security, and continuity burn brighter than the darkness that sought to extinguish them. Three years later, the road remains long and the terrain is unforgiving. But our compass is steady, our covenant is unbreakable, and our people remain standing.
