When it comes to resilience, no one can school the Jewish people.
Every nation and every culture has its share of tragedy, but when it comes to resurgence after near-total destruction, Jewish history is in a class of its own. The English language bears witness to this dark reality, absorbing words like Diaspora, pogrom and even Holocaust in an attempt to capture the harrowing experiences of Jewish history. Phoenix-like, this multiracial, multilingual people, constituting less than half a percent of the world’s population, has inexplicably risen from ashes time and time again. The Jews stubbornly refuse to succumb to the forces that seek the permanent removal of their name from the family of peoples of the earth.
Although we are well-acquainted with resilience, each generation of Jews must relearn its lessons for itself. There is no great genetic reservoir of collective experience that affords comfort to a mother when her child walks in the street with a kippah on his head, nor is there an autonomous reflex that blocks out the perception of vulgar Jew-hatred in public, as keffiyeh-clad demonstrators shout “Zionist murderers” at us just as medieval mobs once declaimed us as “Christ-killers.”
Previous generations developed skills that allowed a remnant to survive countless existential threats from Beitar to Auschwitz. Our presence today is evidence of their success. We cannot assume, however, that the survival strategies that saved at least some Jews in the Pale of Settlement or pre-Revolutionary Iran will work in suburban New Jersey after Oct. 7. We are all still reeling from the physical attack on our brothers and sisters in Israel and the deafening roar of Jew-hating sympathizers around the world. What survival skills will help us build resistance after Oct. 7? Three specific strategies seem to be emerging in Jewish communities:
- We will continue to look to our past for guidance and inspiration. We will find historical analogies to our times, and we will find innovative ways to translate earlier solutions to our own challenges. We will not be paralyzed or remain frozen in place. We will look to our elders and sages, who will tell us of eras long past, and we will use those teachings as inspiration for our collective future. Just as we emerged from three disastrous wars with the Romans in the first and second centuries, wars that destroyed the Temple, exiled tens of thousands of Jews from Judea, and threatened the outright elimination of Judaism itself, we learned to rely on the sages of the Mishnah and then the Talmud, who charted a path that allowed us to survive two millennia of exile in hostile circumstances.
- We will draw strength from one another. Just as there were times when centrifugal forces threatened to fractionate the Jewish people, there were also times when centripetal forces drew us together. We will gather, we will communicate with each other and we will ignore the petty differences that seemed so important when we had less pressing concerns. Like the survivors of the Shoah living in the Displaced Persons camps of Europe recognized the importance of rebuilding shattered families with the shards of survivors, literally giving birth to a generation of children called Moshiach’s kinder—the “children of the era of the Messiah”—with the consciousness that no matter what country our ancestors fled from, no matter what language we spoke with our mothers, we are all “one people with one heart.”
- We will remember that we will, one day, dance again. As Solomon, the wisest of kings, recorded in Ecclesiastes, there is “a time to weep, a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.” We are not at the end of this dark time in Jewish history, nor do we know how long the darkness will last. But even by terming the initial event “Oct. 7,” the date in the secular calendar, rather than the Hebrew date of Simchat Torah, we acknowledge that the rejoicing of that holiday remains untouched for future generations, and hopefully for our own as well. Just as there is a time for war, there will once again be a time for peace.
One Hebrew phrase expresses confidence that we will endure, we will mourn our dead and console the living, that we will overcome this challenge and add this tragedy to the long list accumulated in our nearly four millennia of historical existence: Am Yisrael Chai, the Jewish people live.
