By Albert Stern / BJV Editor
As the gabbai at Chabad of the Berkshires, my jobs include overseeing the Torah service and also standing up to read aloud from the prayer book on Shabbat and holidays. On rare occasions, when I feel I have something relevant on my mind, I share a few thoughts with the congregation.
On the past Day of Atonement, the Jewish world marked the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. As the day ebbed and before the Nailah prayers were recited, I took the opportunity to speak about a Jewish Federations of North America video I had just watched that that featured Doron Olmog, former major general in the Israel Defense Force reserves, Israel Prize recipient, and now chair of The Jewish Agency for Israel.
Olmog is the epitome of the hard, fearless, and pragmatic military leader that Israel produces, a ferocious warrior who led soldiers into combat beginning with the War of Attrition of the late 1960s. He was the first soldier on the runway in Entebbe, led a unit during the Operation Moses airlift of 7,000 Jews from Ethiopia, and headed the Southern Command after Gaza was ceded to its Palestinian inhabitants in 2003.
In this Federation video, Olmog’s topic was the Yom Kippur War and the lessons Israel learned from being caught off-guard by the invasion of Syrian and Egyptian armies. He recounted his own riveting experience of being called up to fight in the Sinai, but also the tragic story of his equally heroic brother, who perished on the northern front after falling with a wound that might have been treated if appropriate medical supplies had been on hand. Olmog’s message was that he had devoted his career to ensuring that Israel would never again be caught unprepared and its existence threatened, that no more Israeli lives would be lost in the careless way his brother’s life was ended. The video ended with a clearly ill-at-ease Olmog duetting with a purple-haired folk singer on Naomi Shemer’s “Lu Yehi,” the song indelibly associated with the1973 conflict – and I thought that if that’s where Israel was in the year 5784, at a point where its fiercest warrior was nostalgically singing old songs, “avade güt” (Yiddish for ‘certainly good’).
I shared with the congregation that my life had also been changed by the Yom Kippur War – my family had made aliyah to Israel in 1973, just six weeks before the outbreak of hostilities. I was 11-years-old. Had the war not complicated our resettlement plans, I might have spent my adolescence and beyond in Israel. My family returned to the US in 1975, but I experienced civilian life during those years of wartime and terrorism. Although Israel was in danger of being overrun by enemy armies, I did not grasp the existential threat at the time – my only consciousness was of the invincible IDF of the Six-Day War, a force that would soon take care of business. It did – but I retained an incomplete understanding of how close we had come to losing everything.
That is no longer the case – I’ve not only read extensively about the history of the war, but also how Israel used the experience to transform itself from the underdeveloped country in which I grew up into the Start-Up Nation of astonishing technological innovation. Channeling the Olmog video through my own lens, I summed up my talk to the congregation by saying though our achievements as Jews are outsized, the number of Jews in Israel and the Diaspora is small. We Jews have to put aside our differences to ensure Israel’s success and our own security – we have no alternative. Without Israel, there is nowhere else for us to go. If Israel falls, our good lives are finished everywhere.
By Simchat Torah, our worst nightmares were unfolding. We are living through them still. Many congregations did not dance with the Torah on Simchat Torah, an understandable response; but at Chabad, we did. We performed the hakafot though we were reeling from the news of the losses. It didn’t feel entirely right and never felt joyous, but it was the necessary thing for the people who wanted to be there. My years as a gabbai at the bimah ensuring that the parsha is being read accurately helped me recognize the necessity of carrying on. The Torah does not stop. We read it aloud each week because it has to be given life on its schedule and on its terms. And if on Simchat Torah we could not give the Torah our customary outpouring of joy, those of us who came together on Saturday evening and Sunday morning gave the Torah an abounding measure of love. Etz Chayim hi l’machazikim ba, vi’tom’cheha m’ushar – it is a tree of life for those who hold fast to it, and those who uphold it are happy. Since Oct. 7, I cherish it all the more.
Maybe it was Doron Olmog’s message about preparing for the future still echoing in my brain after Oct. 7, but I almost immediately began considering what might lie ahead for Israel and the Jewish people 50 years into the future. And thinking ahead to what might be 50 years hence also led me to think back about my own Jewish life. I grew up in Miami Beach and Tel Aviv among a multitude of survivors of both pogroms and the Holocaust. I was raised in a house with a grandmother whose psyche was shattered by the murder of her parents, grandparents, and three brothers and their families in Belarus, as well by her misplaced guilt at having been unable to save them. My friends growing up included children and grandchildren of survivors, and even in recent years in the Berkshires, I have formed new relationships with friends who shared similar experiences, some of whom, like myself, are entering our golden years still finding out new stories that our forebears tried to keep from us, mysteries that nevertheless shaped our lives.
We were the next generation – privileged to be sure, but also proximate to the survivors’ trauma. We were key players in their efforts to reclaim what might be called a normal life – raising families, building community, pursuing livelihoods, living as Jews, grappling with matters of faith, and all the other things that ordinary people did, well, ordinarily. We were their building blocks of a future – but at the same time we were bystanders to their experiences, incapable of penetrating their dark places.
Despite the unbreachable gulf between my generation and the generation that preceded us, we all shared equally in the State of Israel. No matter where one stood, Israel was something new, unique, surprising, dynamic, exciting, and a source of overwhelming pride. A secure and powerful Israel was the paradigm of the Jewish people going forward – a future that, I believed, didn’t include Jews like me, who lived in the shadow of a trauma we were powerless to fully repair or even comprehend, but that we had to work against as best we could. Surely, there would be wars, violence, tragedies, and antisemitism – but never again something like that.
As a saying popular since Oct. 7 holds, “never again is now.” We are not at the beginning of the end nor, to borrow Churchill’s phrase, even at the end of the beginning of this fight in Israel or in the Diaspora. Eventually there will be a reckoning about Oct. 7 and it will be unlike anything the State of Israel and the Jewish people have ever known. It will be heartbreaking, disappointing, and infuriating, and will be dissected, relished, and distorted by our opponents. It will divide both Israelis and Diaspora Jews more than any issue has in the past and nobody is going to be right. And it will change how we look at Israel and at ourselves as Jews for generations.
This is happening now and it is happening to us. The trauma of Oct. 7 will be a part of the fabric of our lives for a long time to come, but nonetheless – all that we seek, may it be.