What October 7 Will Always Mean To Me

Three years have passed since October 7, 2023. It’s unimaginable for me to think how fast time flies. I have written about Israel many times. I have argued about politics, defended or criticized positions, worried about the direction of Israeli society, and tried, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, to explain this complicated country to people who see it from thousands of miles away.

This date, October 7, has taken a whole new meaning for me. I am not the same person I was on October 6, 2023. I suspect that many others, here in Israel and around the world feel the same way.

I still remember the shock of that morning. At 06:29 in the morning, during my morning run, not understanding why on a Sabbath, my phone was buzzing with news alerts. Driving back home, listening to reports of thousands of rockets being fired from Gaza onto Israel. I remember trying to understand what I was seeing and hearing, while my mind refused to accept the accounts on both radio and TV. People calling into newsrooms pleading for their lives.

Was that happening? Or was it a prank? Then came the understanding. Communities in the Western Negev being overrun. Families murdered in their homes. Young people slaughtered at a music festival. Children, parents, and grandparents taken as hostages and dragged into Gaza. It was too much to process back then, and it’s still hard to process this day.

You know, there are events that become part of history books. And then there are events that divide your life into a “before and after.” For Americans of certain generations, Pearl Harbor and 9.11 are such dates. For me, October 7 is that date.

Before October 7, I believed many things with a certain confidence. I believed that however bitter our conflict had become, there were limits. I believed that coexistence was not simply an aspiration but something that could eventually become the normal condition of life here. I believed that people, given the opportunity to encounter one another as human beings, could overcome at least part of the hatred handed down to them. Deep down I still want to believe those things. But I would be lying to myself if I said that October 7 did not shake those beliefs.

I am an American and an Israeli. In America I am a Democrat. Here in Israel, I am a liberal Jew. I belong to the conservative (or Masorti movement) in Israel. I have spent much of my adult life believing that progressive values, those of human dignity, equality, tolerance, pluralism, and compassion, are values worth defending.

But what is unacceptable for me, and I have no compassion for, is how even these days, people who spoke the language of my values struggle to find that same compassion for Israelis.

There is plenty of time to debate Israeli policy, Benjamin Netanyahu, settlements, Gaza, Palestinian rights, and the history of the conflict. I have strong views about many of those subjects, and I have never believed that loving Israel requires silence about its failures.

But following October 7, I expected something much simpler. I expected people to look at a murdered Israeli child and see a murdered child. I wanted them to look at a terrified mother and see a mother. I expected them to look at young people who had gone dancing and recognize themselves in them. I wanted the world I once believed in, to see the humanity of Israelis and do so without adding a political “footnote.”

For me, that has become one of the deepest wounds of October 7.

And yet October 7 has also forced me to think deeply about what it means to love Israel. Love of country cannot mean pretending that everything your country does is right. I feel that about both my countries, US and Israel alike.

If October 7 taught me anything, it is precisely how dangerous moral blindness can become. I refuse to accept the proposition that compassion is a finite resource. I can demand that Hamas and its supporters be held responsible and accountable for the massacre it carried out while also demanding that Israel live according to the values upon which I believe a Jewish state should stand.

I can love Israel fiercely while insisting that the Israel that emerges from this trauma be better than the Israel that entered it.

I carry with me the memory of the people who were murdered, the communities that were shattered, the soldiers who did not return, the thousands of families whose lives will never again be what they were.

And equally important, October 7 has changed the way I think about Israel’s place in the world. For years, I have been involved in trying to explain Israel. More recently, that work has convinced me that perhaps “explaining Israel” is itself the wrong approach.

Israel should not have to exist permanently in the defendant’s chair. Israel is not merely a conflict. Israel is people. It is the Arab doctor treating a patient whose religion he does not ask. It is the Jewish and Arab coworkers sharing lunch. It is a scientist, farmer, teacher, musician and volunteer. It is the arguments at the Shabbat table. It is Hebrew and Arabic and Russian and Amharic spoken on the same street. It is extraordinary generosity and infuriating bureaucracy, courage and stupidity, idealism and contradiction. Israel is a society of human beings.

October 7 made me understand how urgently those human beings need to be seen. Because Israelis need their humanity restored in a conversation that too often reduces them to symbols.

That is why I remain hopeful despite everything. Just to clarify. Not optimistic. I am not sure I can claim that anymore. Hopeful. Because hope is different. I think that optimism is the expectation that things will get better, and hope is the decision that, even when you have no guarantee they will get better, you will continue working to make them better.

Three years after October 7, this is where I find myself. I must admit that today I am an angrier person than the one I was in 2023. I am also much more skeptical than I was back then.

There are people and movements I once trusted whom I no longer see in quite the same way. There are assumptions I once made that I can no longer hold so easily. But I have not given up on the possibility of another future.

I refuse to allow Hamas, their global supporters or all those who voice opposition to very existence of the State of Israel “hijack” the global narrative for what Israel is, and through these efforts determine how the world sees Jews, Israelis, or those left around the world who still support us.  I refuse to allow antisemitism to determine what kind of liberal I am. I refuse to allow extremists, Israeli or Palestinian alike, to convince me that hatred is realism and hope is naïveté. And I refuse to believe that the only lesson of October 7 is that Jews around the world, whtether they live on Kibbutz Be’eri, London, New York or Melbourne, must forever be afraid.

There must be another lesson.  The understanding that life is fragile and the assumptions upon which we build our lives can disappear in a single morning. What remains is how we choose to act.

So, on October 7, I remember. I remember the people who woke up that morning believing it was an ordinary holiday. I remember those who ran toward danger to save people they had never met. I remember the families who have lived with an empty chair ever since. I remember a country that discovered in a matter of hours how vulnerable it was, and in the days that followed how extraordinary its people could be.

Because after everything that has happened, choosing life itself is the answer. Three years later, that is what October 7 means to me.