Rabbi Hillel Goldberg, PhD is the editor and publisher of the Intermountain Jewish News, for which he has been writing award-winning commentary for over 50 years. His latest book is Across the Expanse of Jewish Thought.
Israel isn’t moving on. Nor are the Jewish people. Oct. 7 is like July 4: fixed in consciousness. It changed Jews inside and outside of Israel forever.
I’m seeing double. So much flies by, but one hammer does not move: Oct. 7. I’m seeing the current take on Israel by the U.N., by Joe Biden, by the media, in the latest twists and turns on what Israel did or didn’t do, or should or shouldn’t do. None of this budges the anchor: Oct. 7.
So, we have a new Israel.
It and not reactions to it around the world is driving the future.
A new Israel: Not taking its existence for granted, not seeing redemption in a peace agreement with Saudi Arabia (if it comes), not tearing itself apart over judicial reform or anything else, not putting aside its grief over its fallen heroes; mostly, though, not able to set aside the reality of the inhuman depths to which Hamas and its fellow travelers sink to express their unbridled hatred of Israel and Jews.
There is a psychology to being hated. It hasn’t torn so deeply into the Jewish psyche since the Holocaust, which, Jews had come to assume, would “never again” happen.
Now we know that if it could, it would.
That’s what Oct. 7 means to the Israeli psyche and the Jewish people. Whether the current Israeli administration stays in power, whether the U.N. stays hostile to Israel, whether Biden stays friendly to Israel, whether the Houthis or Hezbollah erupt against Israel, whether peace falls upon the land; no matter what, the meaning of Oct. 7 will not change.
This article appeared in the Intermountain Jewish News.