It has been a year.
The reports were awaiting us when we awoke on Simchat Torah morning, after having been present at Temple’s service that included reading the Torah’s end and beginning and the Consecration of young students.
Even then, and until now,
We discovered that the attacks of October 7, 2023 by Hamas took the lives of people whom friends of ours knew, and that friends of ours knew hostages who had been taken, some likely still in captivity, others killed by their captors.
I do not always agree with what governments and armies do, including those of the State of Israel.
Yet, the sense of worldwide extended family with Jews everywhere, some who agree with me, and some who don’t, continues.
The college protests against Israel led me to read documents from the late 1940s, including statements from the Arab nations in 1947 that denied any Jewish connection to the land of Israel, ties that had been affirmed by generations of Christians and Muslims, with declarations being issued that ignored the Jewish presence in that land for centuries.
And, sadly, I rememberedthat, in the midst of my interfaith work, the statements that had been made by people in the local community decrying Jews and their relations with the earliest Muslims, well beyond individual quotes about how to treat Jews cited in the original Hamas covenant.
Even with all of that, my own hopes for peace continued, best illustrated by a rabbinic trip to Egypt, Jordan, and Israel in January of 1996, two months after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, and a few weeks before a wave of terrorist attacks, including the Dizengoff Center suicide bombing, carried out by a Hamas member. Hopes for peace diminished then, and later, and while the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in beginning August of 2005 (I was attending a Jewish educators convention at the time) brought a sense of possible rapprochement, the Hamas takeover following a civil war there in June 2007 led to the beginning of thousands of rockets being fired by Hamas into Israel for years, and several Israel/Gaza (Hamas) conflicts that continued over the years. The firing of rockets from Gaza on the morning of October 7 as cover for the coming brutal attacks was a cynical strategy that concealed the worst yet to come.
I know that some people with whom I have worked on social justice issues buy into the “settler-colonialist” claims about Jews who moved to the British Mandate of Palestine and, in years before, to the land of Israel controlled by the Ottoman Empire. But Jews were already living there, a fact that has been lost in the last year of conflict in the Middle East and amid protests that justify Hamas, Hezbollah and other groups that have targeted not only Israeli Jews but Jews around the world. Just remember that Jews didn’t have an “empire” when they were living in various countries. We faced anti-Semitism over and over again, wherever we lived.
Even amid disagreement, members of the worldwide Jewish community still feel solidarity with one another, and a belief that being members of the human family demands of us the need to follow the best of the teachings passed down to us. And while those are interpreted in different ways, I still believe that dialogue and peaceful coexistence are possible.
For today, I will join my home community to mark what happened on October 7 and later, mourning those killed that day and later, remembering those taken, and lamenting the continuation of a war that didn’t need to happen.
May the One who makes peace in the highest heavens let peace descend upon us, somehow, some way.
