Three Years On – Am Israel Chai
Three years ago, the actions of thousands of individuals determined to use hate and violence succeeded in creating more violence. My university, Tel Aviv University, lost 124 people that day. This would be an inconceivable number for any university in a nation much larger than Israel. This number in a country of 10 million is a tragedy that will stay with us for decades, and in our history for thousands of years. We have not forgotten massacres in Tzfat or Hebron or Kishinev or Casablanca.
Not all things lead to good. Those families, those friends, those individuals, will never get to live a life. The civilians who lost their lives on the other side of the border will never get to lead their lives because of the actions of their government.
When I lived in Israel, I took on the task of observing and learning and understanding this country. I wanted to understand how a country that lives on the precipice of extinction, born on the ashes of the worst horror of the 20th century, could choose life, and contribution to the world. Israel contributes 500 billion dollars annually to the world economy. It produces innovations in agriculture, medicine and technology that save millions of people around the world. No good deed is unpunished. Hate and jealousy are often the price of relevance.
What can we learn from this horrible day? That we are all human. We all feel hurt, we all feel anger, we all feel a desire for revenge and we all have a choice. We have a choice to be consumed by the pain and the anger and create more pain and anger, or we can feel the pain but focus on the goal, the goal of a better life, of a better world, of being strong while also being the kind of strength that friends and family can depend on. The kind of strength that builds.
Those who tried to bring Israel down harmed a lot of people, they used the war they started to turn a lot of people against Israel, they made a lot of people revive the oldest hate on earth. But I do not believe that they changed Israel or Jewish people.
I believe in the end, they only reminded the world that there’s a reason why the world uses our Torah as the moral compass for our civilization. Individually, we are as imperfect as all humans. As a nation and a people, we are worth emulating and worth celebrating.
We lost a lot of people that day. They will not come back. They are lost just as those in the Hebron massacre, in Kishinev and every other pogrom. But in each massacre, in each war, we get a chance to find ourselves again. Every time, we may have lost individuals, who are as precious as the brightest diamonds. But the nation and the people live. Am Israel Chai.